The danger of rugby

Tomorrow (Sunday) is the day when the Super Bowl is played, when much of America gathers around their TVs to watch the game and/or the commercials and/or the halftime show. I will not be among them, having sworn off the game because of the accumulating evidence of the serious brain damage that the players are risking. I think that while adults can choose to take such risks, it is immoral for schools and universities to encourage young people to do so and they should remove it from the list of activities.
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Rutger Bregman speaks out against the tax avoiders

He was the 30-year old Dutch historian who became a viral sensation at Davos by saying that the way to prosperity is not through philanthropy but with higher taxes, not something the attending oligarchs wanted to hear. He says that he had become irritated by all the billionaires at the meeting patting each other on the back for thinking they were improving the world by talking about “participation, justice, equality and transparency” but really they were deflecting attention away from the fact that they are a big part of the problem because of their tax avoidance that results in them not paying their fair share.
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‘Centrist’ does not mean ‘not a far-right extremist’

It is incredible how much attention that billionaire former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz has got for his vanity project of running as an independent for president. He portrays himself as a ‘centrist’, the label that politicians like to adopt. These right-wing oligarchs like to use that term vaguely, to mean anyone who is not a far-right lunatic. Surely any normal definition of centrism would have some resemblance to supporting positions that the majority of people favor, such as Medicare for All, higher marginal tax rates on income and wealth, and living wages? He is vocally opposed to such measures..
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What kind of person does such a thing?

I came across this story about a white Detroit police officer Gary Steele who stopped a young black woman Ariel Moore, 24, because her car license tags had expired. He then had her car towed and forced her to walk home in the bitter cold that had gripped Detroit on Tuesday, all the while driving alongside her and filming her misery and posting it to his Instagram account.
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The War Party springs into action

Whatever one might think about the merits of Donald Trump’s erratic claims of wanting to pull US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan, it has made the War Party that spans both Democrats and Republicans go into a tizzy. The Republican party and its leader Mitch McConnell have been slavish in their devotion to Donald Trump, refusing to defy him even during the shutdown votes and utterly unwilling to criticize him for pretty much anything, however outrageous. But they are willing to defy him on the troop withdrawals, showing that when it comes to supporting the war machine, the senate can act with unusual speed and bipartisanship.
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More on commercials as windows to the zeitgeist

I have written before about how commercials on TV are a pretty good measure of the zeitgeist. While niche companies may seek notoriety by airing an ad that skirts the boundaries of social acceptability in order to create controversy, major companies do not want to alienate large segments of their market and thus their ads give an idea of what is acceptable in mainstream society.
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Violating parking etiquette

Last Sunday, I went for breakfast with some friends to a local eatery. In front of the restaurant are three parking spaces in a row that are parallel to the curb. One car was already parked but straddling two spaces. When I parked in the third spot, that meant that no more cars could park. This was the second time such a thing had happened at that same restaurant. This kind of thing really annoys me and I vented about it to my breakfast companions.
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The tax competition ramps up – and that’s great!

I wrote earlier how pleased I was to see a competition to find ways to raise taxes on the wealthy, that in addition to congresswoman Alexadria Ocasio-Cortez’s plan to raise the marginal income tax on incomes over $10 million to 70%, senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a tax on wealth in which a 2% annual tax would be levied on all household net worth above $50 million, with an additional 1% surtax for above $1 billion in income.
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These so-called philanthropists are really ruthless monsters

A new report from ProPublica says that Purdue Pharma, a major manufacturer of opioids such as OxyContin that was founded by the Sackler family, aggressively marketed them in ways that led to addiction and is now also trying to profit from drugs that seek to combat addiction or reverse the effects of overdoses. In other words, they want to benefit both ways from addiction, first by causing it and then selling treatments for the problem that they continue to cause. This information came from a filing in a case against the company
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