NYC grassroots activists call Amazon’s bluff – and win!

Amazon, like many greedy big corporations, often loudly announce that they are planning to open a new facility somewhere with the promises of many new jobs, and will go to the city that provides them with the best deal. Cities then scramble to compete with each other to provide them with huge tax and other incentives, sometimes depriving their own people of much needed resources for schools and other public services. This is even though the corporations already make massive profits and pay little or no tax and could well afford to pay the local taxes. The corporations often demand that the details of the bidding (‘begging’ would be a better word) provided by each city be secret, better enabling them to play each city off against the others.
[Read more…]

Taking advantage of people desperate for miracle cures

Coincidences abound. A couple of weeks I was talking about Jonathan Miller and the next day I learned that he had died. Then just a few of days ago, I mentioned Alan Keyes’s name because he was the source of the so-called ‘crazification factor’, the size of the population that votes on the basis of tribal loyalty over everything else. I casually wondered what had happened to him. He used to constantly run as a Republican for federal elected offices the US senate in 1988, 1992, and 2004, as well as the presidency in 1996, 2000, and 2008. He is a conservative Christian, fiercely anti-abortion and anti-gay and was a birther to boot.
[Read more…]

Guess who is being referred to?

I came across this passage about a well-known national leader.

For someone who has made a career out of lying, [He] is surprisingly bad at it. His tell-tale giveaways would be obvious to a five-year-old. He smirks, his eyes dart sideways and his arms shoot out in strange directions. This must be horribly familiar to so many women.

Worse, [he] is utterly shameless in his lying.
…

He’d repeated a few untruthful slogans over and over again and it was job done. As so often, no one had really laid a finger on him because he is so well-defended. Often he doesn’t even realise he’s lying, it’s so deeply embedded. He has become the nation’s voice of mendacity. The man who lies so we don’t have to. Lucky us.

It is Guardian columnist describing Boris Johnson’s performance in a debate with Jeremy Corbyn a couple of days ago.

Trump and Johnson. What a pair. They were made for each other.

Want to be president? First become a billionaire

It used to be that young children were told that if they worked hard, then one day they could become president. That seems so quaint. Now the advice they should be given is that first they must become billionaires. It used to be that personal wealth used to just buy influence. Then it bought candidates. Now it is what is becoming necessary for people to be candidates. Jon Schwarz examines the big role that personal wealth plays in American politics. He says that the reason why Kamala Harris had to drop out of the race just as Michael Bloomberg entered it is because of a 1976 Supreme Court ruling in Buckley v. Valeo that said that candidates can spend as much of their own money as they want to but are limited in how much they can contribute to other candidates.
[Read more…]

Speaking the truth when resigning

When senior government people resign from their office, they often use boilerplate language about how they were proud to serve, how they respected their superiors, and only hint that they are leaving because of serious disagreements. This may be due to the human desire to not cause a fuss or the less noble desire to not burn bridges with those in power as they seek new opportunities.

But Alexandra Hall Hall, a 33-year veteran of the British foreign service and a senior British diplomat in the US, said to hell with that, she was going to tell it like it is.
[Read more…]

Academics corrupted by power

One of the luxuries of being an academic is that one has more freedom than most to express one’s honest opinion on things. This makes academics sought after for their views on issues of public policy. It is often tempting for academics who have made a name for themselves to sign on to serve in governments. Some may do it because they feel that this gives them an opportunity to press more for policies that they favor. For others it may be just the allure of being close to the seats power and to gain even greater visibility.

But the cliché that ‘power corrupts’ applies very strongly to academics who fly too close to the bright lights of power and find that they end up supporting atrocious policies. A good example is Samantha Power who at one time was a Harvard academic who had a good reputation for her work on human rights around the world. In 2003 she wrote an essay that was sharply critical of US foreign policy, as Jon Schwarz writes.
[Read more…]

“No malarkey”? Really?

I am a certified old guy. Just for the fun of it, I sometimes show my children how in touch I am with the younger generation by using slang that is way out of date, such as ‘far out’, ‘groovy’, ‘dig’, and ‘hip’. But even I would not stoop to using the word ‘malarkey’ and it baffles me that Joe Biden, already fighting an image that he is utterly out of touch with current times, would actually use it in his campaign slogan.

Conan O’Brien talks to Biden’s communications person as to the wisdom of this decision.

But maybe this might work. Young people may not know that this is a very old term and may think he has coined new slang and that would make him a trendsetter.

I can’t believe I’m defending Donald Trump

I was intrigued by this news item.

One of President Donald Trump’s most common responses to intelligence briefings is to doubt what he’s being told, former Deputy Director of Intelligence Susan Gordon said Tuesday.

Gordon, an intelligence veteran of more than 30 years, said Monday that Trump had two typical responses to briefings.

“One, ‘I don’t think that’s true,'” Gordon told the Women’s Foreign Policy Group.

“The one is ‘I’m not sure I believe that,'” Gordon continued, “and the other is the second order and third order effects. ‘Why is that true? Why are we there? Why is this what you believe? Why do we do that?’ Those sorts of things.”

The article implied that Trump was asking these questions because he had got information from other sources that he liked and trusted more that went counter what the intelligence briefers were telling him.

In my own teaching of science, I had two goals: (1) to enable students to sufficiently understand (not necessarily believe) the scientific consensus on the topic we were learning so that they could use it to solve problems; and (2) to get in the habit of reflexively asking themselves the questions: What do I believe? Why do I believe it? What is the evidence for it? What is the counter-evidence against it?

I felt that these two things enabled them to function is the world of science as well as building up necessary critical thinking skills that would stand them in good stead in all areas of their lives.

So I cannot fault Trump for asking the intelligence officials such questions. Of course, it is not clear if he was actually seeking information in order to make better judgments or whether he was merely finding a way to reject conclusions he did not find congenial. Given what we know about him, the latter is likely but still the asking of such questions is a good thing.

The Democratic party’s problematic foreign policy positions

The Democratic party does not have a good record on foreign policy. The party’s establishment has long adopted hawkish interventionist polices rationalized by asserting humanitarian motivations that have doubtful validity. As Alex Kane writes, one notable feature has been the subservience of the party leadership to the dictates of the Israel lobby, even though the grass roots of the party and progressive Jewish groups have long since distanced themselves from it. In the party leadership, we see an abundance of so-called PEPs (Progressive Except for Palestine). Three powerful Democratic congresspersons Eliot Engel, Jerome Nadler, and Nia Lowey have been instrumental in advancing the lobby’s agenda but all three are encountering progressive challengers in the upcoming primaries.
[Read more…]