A good, but sad read from a local Alabama newspaper that turned up in my news feed. I see lots of folks (looking at you Fox News) furiously backpedaling saying they have always encouraged vaccination. These people need to be held to account when this is all over, if not sooner.

‘I’m sorry, but it’s too late’: Alabama doctor on treating unvaccinated, dying COVID patients

I have had this happen a couple of times. Called Coal Rolling. Some friends of mine don’t believe that this is a real thing. Actually pretty lame, but the video doesn’t really give an accurate view. The truck swerved into my space pretty aggressively. I did see him coming and figured I wasnt going to let him push me off the road. Had my nephew visiting from Germany in the car. Welcome to America!

Much has been said and written about the Capitol Riots on Jan. 6, 2021. There are still many unanswered questions. They are difficult questions because they aren’t questions about what happened, but what didnt happen. Examining such negatives requires a steady gaze, because, well, lots of things don’t happen and it is very easy to get confused or be misled. Here are the big questions as I see them:

• Why didnt the police use force, even when violently attacked? This is so out of character for American police that it is stupefying. When did we ever see US police not respond to violence with ratched up violence? In small and large conflicts as long as anyone can remember, police have never taken this stance. Surely there was a strong order not to attack protesters, even when attacked. Who gave this order and why?

• Why were the protestors not afraid of the police? This was more than some sort of white privilege. Rioters knew they had nothing to fear from police and acted accordingly. They were surely tipped off to the police rules of engagement. By who, and why is the next question. Note that the one act of violent response, the shooting of a woman ignoring police orders, was only a brief shock to the rioters. They did not retreat, not even briefly.

• Why was police equipment not available? We have seen lots of police crowd control particularly in the last year. This bore no resemblance to any other similar crowd control situation.

• Why was backup not called in for four hours? I can’t provide any particular answers or speculation here. Again, I can’t imagine any other police force put in this situation. If the rioters knew the police were barred from using force, and perhaps if the rioters had also promised not to use force, then delays would be acceptable to the people in control. There would be no massive loss of life, particularly police lives.

• Why did President Trump wait four hours to call off the rioters? Once he made his statement, the rioters filed out, almost comically organized and obedient. He was clearly in charge and clearly wanted this event to continue up until this point. Why did he finally decide to pivot after this length of time?

• Why did Senate members still vote to block ratification of the election? Clearly this was the entire goal, to stop ratification of the election and cause chaos. It is also possible the goal was to see key members of the federal government assassinated. There were numerous statements by rioters searching for the number two and three elected officials in the line of succession for the stated purpose of their assassination. This was Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi. People of different parties and with opposing views on nearly everything. It appears non-partisan and aimed squarely at the presidential line of succession.

• Why is there so much resistance in the Republican Party for an investigation? Clearly this is a matter of great national importance. The reaction has been to minimize and deny the events. If congressmens lives were at risk, one would expect them to perhaps want to find out what happened, punish those responsible, and prevent it from happening again. Yet there are no such moves, in fact the moves are in the opposite direction. This leads me to believe that the these representatives never felt they were in any danger, and many have stated as much. It does not seem possible that events on the ground on January 6 led them to believe they were in no danger. My only conclusion is that they had prior assurances that they would not be harmed. This means they had foreknowledge of the events, at least acquiesced in the plan and did not object afterwards. In short, they were also in on this from the beginning.

I am not sure what will come of this, but it is clearly a sort of mock riot, with the same people controlling both sides and setting rules to assure certain outcomes. This is a serious conspiracy and various actors need to be identified and held accountable. I would think in today’s world, given the sort of people involved, this will all unravel. All roads for these sort of shenanigans in this administration seem to lead back to Steve Bannon and Roger Stone. Anyway, that is my bet. Of course they would not have done this on their own.

Somehow I have never heard of this. From Wiki:

No True Scotsman

130 Unusual Maps That Might Change How You See The World, As Shared In This Online Group

I was born and grew up in Louisiana, a 3rd generation New Orleanian on both my mother’s and father’s side of the family. It was a prosperous place and had been for as long as anyone could remember. It was a natural commerce hub at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and if that wasn’t enough, huge oil and gas deposits fuelled (ahem) the prosperity I remember in my youth. Although I can’t say it felt like prosperity at the time. It felt normal.

Sometime in the 1980s something happed to oil. Suddenly, things weren’t so good any more. Looking back, it was mostly met with a sort of denial, even as the city emptied out and it seemed like everyone was moving somewhere else, mostly to Houston.

For whatever reason, Houston somehow took over New Orleans’ place as the main hub for the petrochemical industry, and turned itself into a modern American metropolis. Meanwhile, New Orleans seemed to sink into decadence like a character from a Tennessee Williams stage play.

I went away to college on the east coast right around this time, and being young, I didn’t see anything unusual about the changes taking place. The friendly, easygoing place I grew up in had turned, well, ugly. By no coincidence a racist huckster named David Duke became prominent in local politics, nearly becoming governor. Still I didn’t see any connection, and neither did anyone else I knew.

I always imagined I would move back to New Orleans and had a low level, ongoing search for jobs there. I was in tech and New Orleans wasn’t known for tech jobs but I figured I could turn up something. But I never did. Jobs there paid a small fraction of what I could make in nearby Texas. I recall my Texas salaries being about 5x of anything I could scare up in New Orleans or even nearby places. Meanwhile, Austin, TX became home and reminded me more than a little if New Orleans. It had good music, a free and easy spirit and a live and let live ethos not often found in the south.

After pretty much my entire adult life in Texas, I find myself looking at the same sort of decline, for the same reasons, and with all of the same symptoms, that I saw in Louisiana in the 1980s. The oil industry seems to be in serious and permanent decline, for a variety of reasons. The decline in infrastructure has become impossible to ignore. Finally a right wing lurch, politically, is happening that is unlike anything I saw in Louisiana.

Over the years I half-joked that I was an economic refugee from Louisiana. Soon I will be a political refugee from Texas. I watched the slow decline of Louisiana and have no interest in living through the decline of Texas. I am retired and don’t have much of a stake in this like I used to. I might have stayed in Texas for my kids, since it is their home. But my kids have no interest in living in Texas, which has surprised me a bit. I suppose we will do what Americans have always done in these sorts of times, move west.

I’ve always been skeptical of cryptocurrency because I have never understood what problem it is attempting to solve. I joke that it has all the disadvantages of cash combined with all of the disadvantages of a credit card. As best I can tell it is only really useful for illegal transactions. Jackson Palmer, originator of Dogecoin, made some statements on Twitter recently that are worth reading and perhaps even thinking about:

After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity.

there is more:

Jackson Palmer on Twitter

I like Mimi Swartz. She sums up the way lots of people I know are thinking right now. This isn’t the Texas of LBJ or Ann Richards, where there seemed to be room for everyone. Austin isn’t the little college town I moved to all those years ago, either. Time to do what Americans have always done at times like this: move on.

A long one from the Economic Policy Institute. Haven’t read it all yet. It claims the reasons from inequality are deliberate and policy choices. Specifically:

• Austerity macroeconomics, including facilitating unemployment higher than it needed to be to keep inflation in check, and responding to recessions with insufficient force;
• Corporate-driven globalization, resulting from policy choices, largely at the behest of multinational corporations, that undercut wages and job security of non-college-educated workers while protecting profits and the pay of business managers and professionals;
• Purposely eroded collective bargaining, resulting from judicial decisions, and policy choices that invited ever more aggressive anti-union business practices;
• Weaker labor standards, including a declining minimum wage, eroded overtime protections, nonenforcement against instances of “wage theft,” or discrimination based on gender, race, and/or ethnicity;
• New employer-imposed contract terms, such as agreements not to compete after leaving employment and to submit to forced private and individualized arbitration of grievances; and
• Shifts in corporate structures, resulting from fissuring (or domestic outsourcing), industry deregulation, privatization, buyer dominance affecting entire supply chains, and increases in the concentration of employers.

Identifying the policy levers generating wage suppression and wage inequality