Cricket World T20 Update

West Indies and England have won their semi-final games against India and New Zealand respectively and will meet in the final on Sunday.

The West Indies v. India game today was a real nail-biter. India batted first and scored 192/2 in their 20 overs and this would normally have been a winning score but this tournament has seen teams successfully chasing extremely difficult targets and West Indies engineered a masterful chase, despite losing their star batter Chris Gayle in the second over. Lendl Simmons and Andre Russell engaged in some serious hitting late in the innings and they reached 196/3 with just two balls remaining.
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Another consequence of the crumbling US infrastructure

It is by now pretty much a given that the mania to cut taxes to enrich the wealthy has resulted in government being deprived of the necessary revenue to maintain its existing infrastructure and public spaces, let alone make any improvements to bring them into line with other developed nations. Anyone who has traveled to other developed and even many developing countries will immediately notice the difference in roads, airports, and other transportation systems and how the once-enviable public spaces of the US, such as its roads, parks, and libraries, are slowly decaying.
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Standing up for the things that matter at the time they matter

Watching the film Trumbo that I reviewed yesterday brought to mind a very old post of mine that quoted Trumbo extensively from a moving letter he wrote to a friend in 1967 that was published in the March 2004 issue of Harper’s magazine (subscription required). It asks us to reflect on what is really important in life, what is worth making a stand for, and how people use the flag and country to shift blame away from themselves for their unprincipled behavior.
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Cooper Union’s stand on bathrooms

The issue of who gets to use what public bathrooms is an increasingly contentious one with the state of North Carolina, for example, passing a law that would force transgender persons to use the facility according to the gender they were assigned at birth and forbidding local entities from doing otherwise. The new law also “prevents all cities and counties from extending protections covering sexual orientation and gender identity at restaurants, hotels and stores.”
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Big victory today for trade unions

On February 16, I wrote about a case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association that had been heard before the US Supreme Court that threatened the existence of trade unions because it challenged a long-standing 1977 precedent. That earlier case named Abood v. Detroit Board of Education allowed unions to collect fees from non-union members to cover the costs incurred in contract negotiations and enforcement that also benefited non-union members.
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