The criminal US criminal (in)justice system

One of the things that the current pandemic has done is strip away the veneer that enabled people to think that things were generally going well in this country except for a few areas that needed work. What has been revealed is that the very fabric holding the society together is highly frayed and needs major repairs. The most obvious deficiency is one that I have been repeatedly hammering on and that is the rotten health care system. Another is the lack of an adequate social safety net for people who find themselves suddenly out of work.
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The dark side of coffee

I wrote recently about an interview with food writer Michael Pollan about his latest book on how coffee works on the body and produces the addiction that so many of us have that makes need to have a cup first thing in the morning and for some of us to drink it throughout the day. In the April 27, 2020 issue of The New Yorker Adam Gopnik reviews several books that paint a somewhat darker picture of coffee as a tool of global capitalism.
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The white supremacist coup of 1898

It is one thing to know in a general way that slavery was cruel and that even after its formal ending following the end of the Civil War, black people continued to be oppressed, with the former slave states creating laws that systematically deprived their black citizens of the rights that they thought they now had. Historian Eric Foner has documented that process masterfully in his book Reconstruction. But it is still shocking to read about individual instances where there was such a flagrant disregard for basic constitutional processes in the effort of whites to shut blacks out of civil life altogether and drive them away.
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James Joyce and Ulysses

I have tried to read some of the classics of English literature. In particular I attempted the works of James Joyce, including his most famous work Ulysses. I gave up early on in that book, deciding that what I was likely to get out of it was not worth the effort that I needed to put into it. It also made me wonder what purpose was served by the author burying the message under so many layers of metaphor, code, obscure allusions, and word play that it required years of study by professors of literature to explain it. This high level of difficulty has led to the suspicion that some of the people who claim to have read and enjoyed it have not really done so but are merely being pretentious.
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Anti-China rhetoric escalates

The Trump administration has done a remarkable about face in its attitude towards China during the current pandemic. After initially praising that nation and its president fulsomely for the way they handled the crisis, it is now harshly criticizing them, starting with insisting on calling covid-19 the ‘Chinese virus’ and accusing them of covering up the emergence of the virus. The motivation for this shift is quite transparent. As it became increasingly clear how badly Trump has bungled this issue, he very likely seeks to distract people from the administration’s woefully incompetent response .
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NASA or Nasa? NATO or Nato? Dealing with acronyms

I almost always use upper case when I am using obvious acronyms, so it is WHO, NASA, NATO, AIDS, and so on. But I have noticed in reading news articles from some but not all sources that certain acronyms are written as if they are just nouns, as in the case of Nato and Nasa. For example, this article from the Guardian refers to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as Noaa and to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science as Vims. Similarly, this article from the BBC refers to Nasa. But the BBC, WHO, NFL, and the NBA are always kept as upper case.
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Samantha Bee the bird lover

While producing her show from her back yard while practicing physical distancing, she discovers her inner bird lover.

Some of you may have caught that this was a riff on Sarah Palin’s famous response to Katie Couric about what media she reads, when she was running for vice-president in 2008.

Ah Sarah, Sarah! Has there ever been such an adept manufacturer of obfuscating word salads?