Let’s take a moment to savor a global victory

The news can be depressing so I thought we could use a bit of good cheer. The United Nations announced that the world has finally eliminated the use of leaded gasoline. Algeria was the last country to do so in July.

When in 1921 engineers at General Motors discovered that adding lead to gasoline improved engine performance, it was already known that lead was toxic but they went ahead with it anyway, arguing that small amounts were not harmful. That was wrong. It became increasingly realized that the copious amounts of lead that were being released into the atmosphere was finding its way into people, leading to all manner of problems, including lower IQ and a propensity for violence. (I wrote about this back in 2014.)
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More civilians killed in Afghanistan

Whenever the US suffers a military setback, it reacts the same way. It lashes out in revenge, usually by bombing the hell out of some people in an effort to show that it is still powerful and to distract attention from its failures. While the US military always says that it aimed at and hit military targets, more often than not innocent people are among the victims of its actions. This seems to be the case with Joe Biden’s bombing of targets in response to the bombing near the Kabul airport that killed over a hundred people. The US military’s initial reports, as usual, claim that mostly militants were hit and that any civilian casualties, if any, were inadvertent or even the fault of the targets.
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Corollary of Parkinson’s Law for sociopaths

The Minnesota Republican party is in shambles after multiple complaints that its chair Jennifer Carnahan created and oversaw a highly toxic environment of casual racism and sexism at all levels of the organization that resulted in many people leaving in disgust.

In conversations with seven current and former staffers of the Minnesota Republican Party, most of them women who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, all shared similar experiences of racism and sexual harassment or assault by high-level employees of the state organization. 

Likewise, all outlined a pattern of reprisal from Carnahan targeting anyone who spoke out about these and other issues within the organization, subjecting employees and even some activists affiliated with the party to repeated verbal abuse.
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Faking a vaccination card is a federal offense

I had been curious about the legal consequences of issuing and using fake covid-19 vaccination cards. I had assumed that it would be at most a violation of state laws and would depend upon what the individual states had decided. But it turns out that it is a federal violation and can thus be prosecuted anywhere in the country. This is because the Centers for Disease Control is a federal agency and the CDC logo is on the cards.
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Democrats also practice election shenanigans

I recently wrote about how a socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary to be the party’s nominee to be mayor of the city of Buffalo and, since the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, would almost certainly be elected mayor at the general election in November. So how did the party establishment that had opposed her react? Not well. They are now trying to eliminate the position of mayor.
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How the sharing economy became professionalized (and hence more expensive)

I have never actually used Vrbo, Airbnb, and similar businesses that offer accommodation. I had been vaguely under the impression that they offered cheap, short-term, accommodations because people were renting out spaces in their homes that were under-utilized, often because their children had left home. They provided basic things like a bed and bathroom access and enabled the renter to make a little extra money and for the budget-conscious traveler to avoid expensive hotels.

But recently I was planning a trip where there was no hotel near the place I wanted to be in. So I looked up Airbnb. I was surprised at how expensive the accommodations were, close to and even more than hotels. It seems like this so-called sharing economy has gone from providing cheap accommodation to being expensive ‘experiences’. I decided that I might as well stay a little distance away in a hotel where at least you have some idea of what you are getting.
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Has it really come to this?

Flight attendants are taking self-defense classes in order to deal with passengers who become unruly and violent, often over the issue of wearing masks.

Is martial arts training going to be part of the orientation program for new employees? Where else are we going to see this trend? Teachers? Bus drivers? Shop assistants? Hospitality workers? Is any job where one has to deal with the public now becoming a potential physical conflict zone?

Madness.

The unconscionable tragedy that the US created in Afghanistan

On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver castigates all four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden) and the members of their administrations as well as the US military and intelligence agencies for the disaster that they created that has led to massive tragedy for the long-suffering Afghan people.

This appalling situation reveals once again that when your basic policy goals are flawed, you start on a road which eventually leads nowhere, however many resources one assigns to it.

“You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

The FDA has granted full approved the use of the Pfizer vaccine for preventing covid-19. Up until now, it had only been granted emergency use authorization and some vaccine-hesitant people had said that they did not want to take an ‘experimental’ treatment that had not received full FDA approval. Let’s hope that they will now take the vaccine because the number of preventable cases and deaths is staggering and heartbreaking.

But I suspect that even this approval will not win over the hard-core skeptics. Take this report that some people are using drugs used to deworm livestock to prevent covid-19 instead of taking the vaccines. The FDA has put out a surprisingly sarcastic statement.


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Ransomware attacks

John Oliver devoted a segment of Last Week Tonight to the problem of ransomware, where hackers break into a computer system, lock up all the data, and then demand payment, usually in cryptocurrencies, in order to provide the key to unlock it. Barely a day goes by without some report about a new ransomware attack. The news stories focus on the havoc caused by attacks on big entities like hospitals, local governments, and businesses. But Oliver points out that with more and more people having their home devices hooked up to the internet, those become vulnerable as well.
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