Trump is desperately trying to hide his failures

Rick Bright, a government scientist who was director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, had warned early on that trying to prevent the coronavirus from coming here was futile and that instead the country needed to quickly start taking steps to meet the inevitable challenge by ordering the necessary supplies to test for and treat the disease. The administration did not like what he was saying and he was reassigned to a different area that did not require his expertise. So he became a whistleblower and his lawyer Debra Katz describes what happened.
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Georgia suspends driver’s license tests

The governor of the state of Georgia has said that, due to the current pandemic situation, people can get their driver’s licenses without actually taking a road test. This has naturally horrified many people because driving puts you in command of a lethal weapon. As any driver will tell you, even when you take driving lessons, spend some time getting practice, and then pass the test, the first few months of driving alone tend to be nervous periods because safe driving habits have not as yet become instinctive. To not have to take the test at all just makes it that much worse.
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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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