Could the massive tragedy of Afghanistan have been averted?

So yet another effort by a foreign power to determine the future of Afghanistan has come to an ignominious end. (See here for a timeline of the US war in that country.) While the speed with which the Taliban finally entered Kabul and took control of the country may have come as a surprise, the end result is surely not. I am struggling (and failing) to think of any time in the post-colonial era where a foreign power invaded a country, overthrew the government, installed a new one more to its liking, and then left, leaving behind a stable society. There are going to be many heated arguments trying to identify who ‘lost’ Afghanistan and pin the blame on them but the reality is that it was always never winnable in the first place. Pouring weapons and soldiers and money into the country just provided an illusion of control.
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When bonkers beliefs lead to murders

The internet is awash with examples of people in the US who believe in the craziest things. Even without seeking them out, my casual websurfing throws up so many that I have become somewhat numb to the examples that I find that demonstrate deep stupidity. But once in a while, I come across things that really boggle the mind, the more so when the perfectly normal way that people start out talking give you no warning that they are about to say things that are completely bonkers.

Take this woman who rose to speak at a school board meeting in Kansas where they were debating whether to require students to wear masks.

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Masks are coming back

I just returned from a trip to the supermarket and noticed that pretty much everyone, except for four people of whom three were young, is wearing masks again. While I always wore masks there and at any indoor venue where I was not sure that everyone was vaccinated, I had noticed last month that mask usage had dropped considerably. I wondered whether people would be more resistant to the advice to mask up again and was glad to see that, at least in this area, people seem to have adopted them again. The county has as yet not mandated that everyone mask up indoors, though with the rising number of infected people due to the Delta variant, I expect to see such a mandate soon.
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Weaponizing language

What do the terms ‘politically correct’, ‘cancel culture’, ‘woke’, ‘death panels’ and ‘death tax’ have in common?

They are all terms that have neutral or positive meanings that right wingers have turned into terms of abuse.

‘Politically correct’ has a long history, originating as a sarcastic reference to orthodox opinions in intra-left debates that then morphed into meaning the avoidance of using terms that were offensive, mostly to marginalized groups. It meant being sensitive to others in our use of language. Weirdly, the right wingers have used it to defend the right of those who want to say offensive things, arguing that they are the victims of ‘political correctness’. When someone begins by saying, “I know that this is not politically correct but …”, you can be sure that they are going to say something that will make you cringe if not angry.
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Barack Obama was a mediocre president and is now a terrible ex-president

Despite some vague gestures towards progressivism early on in his life, Barack Obama clearly saw that being a Wall Street-loving neoliberal while spouting lofty rhetoric was his ticket to bigger things. After largely squandering away his chance while president to strive for major accomplishments, since leaving office, he has been indulging in extremely ostentatious self-glorification, as Liza Featherstone writes.

He’s distinguished himself as an enemy of labor and friend of racist cops. NBA players began to go on strike last August after Jacob Blake, a black man, was shot by police seven times in front of his kids, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Amid a national uprising over the shooting and many other acts of racist police brutality, Obama called LeBron James and players’ union leader Chris Paul and urged them to get back on the court and finish the playoffs, which they did.
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How Trump blew it on infrastructure

After much back and forth, the US Senate has finally passed an infrastructure bill. The bill has a total cost of one trillion dollars and was arrived at after weeks of haggling in which Republicans fought to reduce it from the more ambitious plan that Joe Biden and progressive Democrats had initially wanted. In the end 19 Republicans voted for it, joining all 50 Democrats, and Biden hailed the compromise as a sign that the much sought-after unicorn of bipartisanship was not dead.
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Why the Sackler deal is so bad

The legal cases brought by so many state attorneys general and individuals against the odious Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma was responsible for so many opioid deaths, is going before a bankruptcy judge this week who will decide on a plea deal brought by some state attorneys general.

John Oliver gives a masterful expose of why the deal that has been proposed is such a bad one but will likely get approved. Basically the deal is such that the Sacklers, while pretending to pay billions, will actually get off very lightly by having their considerable personal assets mostly protected and will also be given sweeping blanket immunity from the lawsuits of those who did not agree to be part of this deal and even future lawsuits. They will not even have to plead guilty to any personal wrongdoing in the case, blaming it all on the company even though they were very hands-on in driving the practices that led to massive rates of addiction.

The bankruptcy judge hearing the case has a history of being sympathetic to these kinds of deals which is why the Sacklers shopped around so that they could appear before him in the small town of White Plains, NY. This case shows how the rich can manipulate the legal system to their benefit.

I hope that this show helps to create a big enough uproar that he has second thoughts about letting them get off so easy.

Good riddance to Andrew Cuomo

The governor of New York has resigned following an avalanche of criticism from all sides after a damning investigative report was released by the attorney general of the state of New York Letitia James that he was a serial abuser of women.

I have to admit that I was surprised by the resignation. Cuomo has the reputation of being a ruthless bare-knuckle political infighter and I expected him to put pressure on state legislators to not remove him by impeachment. I can only surmise that he has found that he does not have enough support among them to win that fight or that more revelations are on the way of even more serious allegations.

Will the new climate change report change minds?

The new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lays out the basis for “the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, and global and regional climate simulations.”

The warnings are getting more and more dire, though the situation is not yet hopeless.

Earth is getting so hot that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past a level of warming that world leaders have sought to prevent, according to a report released Monday that the United Nations called a “code red for humanity.”

“It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” said report co-author Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

But scientists also eased back a bit on the likelihood of the absolute worst climate catastrophes.

The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which calls climate change clearly human-caused and “unequivocal” and “an established fact,” makes more precise and warmer forecasts for the 21st century than it did last time it was issued in 2013.
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The 3,000-plus-page report from 234 scientists said warming is already accelerating sea level rise and worsening extremes such as heat waves, droughts, floods and storms. Tropical cyclones are getting stronger and wetter, while Arctic sea ice is dwindling in the summer and permafrost is thawing. All of these trends will get worse, the report said.

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Biggest life expectancy drop since WWII

In a reasonably healthy society one would expect life expectancy to rise or at least approach a plateau as the limits to which we can extend life (assuming that there is a limit) get reached. Dropping life expectancy should be a source of serious concern since it implies that something is seriously out of whack. So the recent dramatic drop in life expectancy in the US has to be a cause for alarm.

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