Good move: Biden commutes death sentences of 37 federal inmates

As his term of office winds down, Joe Biden is trying to minimize the damage that Trump can do and one of things is the federal death penalty. The federal death penalty had.not been carried out for 17 years but when Trump took office in 2017, he proceeded to carry them out with vigor. Biden put back the moratorium when he took office in 2021 but there were still 40 people on death row. He has now commuted 37 of those.

Biden has been somewhat of a vacillator on the death penalty, supporting it during the heyday of ‘get tough on crime’ but then evolving as the political climate changed.
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The BRICS challenge to US financial dominance

The US is an imperial power. Unlike other former empires such as Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium, it hides its imperial nature by various ways, as Daniel Immerwahr describes in his book How to Hide an Empire that I reviewed back in 2019 and further discussed here. Rather than exercising direct over control over large countries, the US empire consists of small regions it calls ‘territories’ and bases scattered over all the world, because that enables it to exercise control without having to deal with large local populations. It is what Immerwahr calls a ‘pointillist’ empire.

China is challenging the US on the global stage and is also adopting the pointillist model with its ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ in which China invests heavily in infrastructure and other development projects in countries around the world, cementing economic links. Back in 2019, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosted a summit on this and despite heavy lobbying by the US to deter countries, 125 nations signed up and attended.
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The great pizza conflict

(Sherman’s Lagoon)

It used to be the case that people had very strong opinions for and against anchovies on pizza. But as the range of pizza toppings has greatly expanded over time, anchovies have faded into the background and the big divider now seems to be over the merits of pineapple.

I myself love pineapple as a fruit but revolt at the thought of putting it on a pizza, maybe because I do not like mixing sweet and savory tastes.

Chaos comes early to the US

After Trump was elected and started surrounding himself with weirdos for his cabinet and advisory roles, people like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Elise Stefanik, and Pete Hegseth, I expected that come January 20th when he actually takes office would be when the chaos started.

But it looks like he decided to get an early start and has chosen the budget process to throw his weight around. The current budget authorizes funding only until midnight on Friday and Republican speaker Mike Johnson thought he had worked out a deal to keep the government running. But then Elon Musk waded in and said the bill was not good enough and effectively scuttled it yesterday. Johnson then tried to get another bill that had the main thing that Trump wanted, which was to suspend the debt ceiling for two years so that he could give his wealthy friends a big tax cut. In order to get it passed in the House of Representatives, Trump vowed that any Republican who voted against it would face primary challengers supported by him.
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A more sophisticated form of identity theft

A couple who are friends of mine woke up yesterday to find that during the night, starting at midnight, hackers had got into their bank accounts and shifted money out of it to various other accounts in several steps during the night.

This kind of breaking into the security of banks and other businesses is not new. What was new was that the thieves had also at the same time hacked into their cell phone service provider and taken over their phone numbers so that they could not use the phones. What was worse, any text alerts that the banks might have been sending to them about suspicious account activity was going to the thieves. It was a nightmare for them to correct the situation because when they went to the local branch of their bank to report it, they were put through to the fraud office and the people there, in order to verify that they were who they said they were, wanted to send them a confirmatory text which of course they would not get because they no longer had a phone. It took them multiple calls all of yesterday and today to finally get the situation at least partly rectified. Now they have to go through the tedious business of telling all their contacts their new phone numbers.and also tell the businesses they deal with that use two-factor authorization of their new numbers.
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The rise of the manosphere

There have been many ugly developments following the election victory of Trump. It seems like all the worst elements in society who harbor abhorrent views have been emboldened to think that they are in control.

Christine Fernando writes about one particular area, and that is the rise of what is known as the ‘manosphere’, where men think that they now have even more power over women than they had before and are willing to say so openly.

Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focusing on polarization and extremism, said she had seen a “very large uptick in a number of types of misogynistic rhetoric immediately after the election,” including some “extremely violent misogyny.”

“I think many progressive women have been shocked by how quickly and aggressively this rhetoric has gained traction,” she said.

The phrase “Your body, my choice” has been largely attributed to a post on the social platform X from Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and far-right internet personality who dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida two years ago. In statements responding to criticism of that event, Trump said he had “never met and knew nothing about” Fuentes before he arrived.
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Michael Moore responds to the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting

In response to the outpouring of anger at the for-profit health insurance companies for their predatory practices that was unleashed by the killing by Luigi Mangione of the UnitedHealth care CEO, there has been a lot of pearl-clutching by the ruling classes and their pundits and political lackeys in both parties, pleading with people not to think of the shooter as a hero and saying that ‘political violence has no place in America’. The last sentiment is utterly disingenuous. Political violence is as American as apple pie and has been used routinely by the ruling classes and their repressive state apparatuses when their power is challenged by ordinary people. What they are scared of is when their authority is challenged by protestors and when political violence targets them.

Apparently Mangione had issued a hand-written manifesto. Many of the mainstream media have refused to publish it in full even though it is very short and have instead quoted bits of it. They have not given any reasons why they did this even though there are many fake ones circulating. Ken Klippenstein says that he has obtained the genuine one and has published it and it is reproduced here in full.

“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

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Film review: The Name of the Rose (1986)

I saw this film a long time ago, soon after it came out. I did not remember much of the details except that it was dark and moody and set in a remote abbey in the Middle Ages and involved the murder of several monks that a visiting monk William of Baskerville (played by Sean Connery) and his assistant Adso of Melk (a very young Christian Slater) try to solve.

I read the book of the same name by Umberto Eco last month, and disliked it for its tedious and lengthy discussions of esoterica involving theology and heresy and religious and political intrigue of that period. The main redeeming feature of the second edition of the book was that it had a postscript by the author explaining how and why he wrote it the way he did, including his choice of the title. While it did not improve the book’s standing in my opinion, it did shed light on the writing process and what an author seeks to achieve.
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Drive now, talk later

People tend to think of time spent driving as wasted, and try to use it to multitask, most commonly by talking on the phone. I know people who specifically use the time driving to catch up on their phone calls. While most people know (or should know) that using a hand-held mobile phone while driving is not a good idea (and it is banned in some states and countries), many have the impression that using hands-free devices (as many cars have now) is safe. But that is not true. There has been considerable research to show that hands-free devices are as distracting to drivers, making them as dangerous to use. This article summarizes the research.
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Medicare tax avoidance by wealthy people

Medicare is the government-run health insurance program for people over 65 years of age. It is a very well-run program and funded by a tax on income that is automatically deducted from people’s paychecks. The Medicare tax is not huge. It is 2.9% for most people and 3.8% for high earners. If you are self-employed, or get any income that is not a salary or wage, you are still obliged to pay that tax when you file your annual income tax. I have done so routinely with any outside income I got from giving talks or from my writings. You fill in a separate form to report self-employment income and another form to pay the tax on it. It is pretty straightforward.

ProPublica has gone through the tax records and found that very wealthy people have exploited a loophole that enables them to avoid paying any Medicare taxes on their income. The article focuses on three of the most egregious tax avoiders.

The trove of tax records behind ProPublica’s “Secret IRS Files” series contains plenty of examples of billionaire financiers who avoided Medicare tax despite earning huge amounts from their companies. In 2016, Steve Cohen, the owner of the New York Mets, paid $0. So did Stephen Schwarzman, head of the investment behemoth Blackstone. Bill Ackman, the headline-grabbing hedge fund manager, was able to shield almost all his income from the tax.
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But these maneuvers by the rich hasten Medicare’s future crisis. Sometime in the 2030s, the program’s trust fund is due to run dry. Closing the loophole, along with eliminating other ways around the tax for wealthy business owners, could raise more than $250 billion over 10 years for Medicare, according to recent government estimates.

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