Category Archives: demographics

According to Bill Barr, and MAGA, there is no systemic racism against black people in this country

The lede of a recent troubling New York Times article, under this headline:

Childbirth Is Deadlier for Black Families Even When They’re Rich, Expansive Study Finds

In the United States, the richest mothers and their newborns are the most likely to survive the year after childbirth — except when the family is Black, according to a groundbreaking new study of two million California births. The richest Black mothers and their babies are twice as likely to die as the richest white mothers and their babies.

The graphics at the beginning of the online version of the article (link above) show the number of children who die in the first year of life per 100,000 childbirths for wealthy white, poor white, wealthy black, and poor black mothers.

All I can say right now is fuck Bill Barr and his bad breathed, bagpiping, culture warrior, killer asshole ilk.

NYT opinion writer Charles M. Blow cited this hard truth from a fifty-five year old report by a Presdidential Commission:

As the 1968 Kerner Commission report put it: “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

source

It’s a tragic law of human nature, if a deadly thing doesn’t affect you, or anybody you know, it’s hard to work up much feeling about it. Most of the time you are not only unaware of it, but, if it threatens your worldview in any way you will indignantly deny it if somebody brings it up.

Homo sapiens, the wise ape.

Marjorie Taylor Buttplug

Marjorie Greene, the unapologetically passionate face of the balls to the wall MAGA party, gave some fiery remarks at a gala in New York City the other night as she accepted the annual Richard M. Nixon patriotic democracy-loving American politician award from New York City’s Young Republican Club. During her remarks she said that had she and Sloppy Steve Bannon organized the January 6th riot, well here she is (as reported by the fake News New York Times):

“And I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won,” she told the audience. “Not to mention, it would have been armed.”

WE WOULD HAVE WON. Not to mention, it would have been armed.

You know, it’s not like Steve Bannon was in the War Room at the Willard Hotel on January 6th or anything like that… but as important as that comment/admission was, she went on to talk about her intimate shopping habits at Target and CVS.

Addressing an audience on Saturday night after being given the Richard M. Nixon Award—assigned by the New York Young Republican Club to “a citizen who exemplifies the fundamental ideals of Americanism,” Greene told those gathered: “By the way, you can pick up a butt plug or a dildo at Target and CVS nowadays. I don’t even know how we got here. This is the state that we’re living in right now.”

https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-sex-toy-comments-spark-avalanche-jokes-memes-1766285

USA! USA!!!

Ari Melber nails a terrible truth about our selectively blind justice system

As we led the world in Covid deaths with MAGA’s staunch, idiotic insistence on personal freedom for infectious assholes, we also lead the world in incarceration. Pretrial incarceration, which is spared our wealthiest citizens charged with felonies, is a violent, brutal, punishing, sometimes deadly world for poor people presumed innocent, locked up in hellish, overcrowded conditions prior to their trial, conviction and sentence. This torture is reserved for the poor and racial and ethnic minorities. Or as Bill Barr, our former culture warrior Attorney General, warned Blacks and Hispanics, in front of a law enfrorcement audience, you’d better obey law enforcement and respect them or they ain’t going to protect you, and shut up, there’s no such thing as systemic racism here you fucking whiners.

Ari Melber with a devastating report on the reality of Riker’s Island and our grotesquely unjust two tiered system of justice in exceptional America.

Fervent rage at 2020 election and the vaccine!

Like feelings themselves, the religious faith of the faithful Is not subject to debate. It is a question of faith and if you have true faith, so-called facts take a backseat to your deeply held belief. Hucksters, scammers and con men may often abuse the trust of people of deep faith, but that is not a concern to the faithful.

The New York Times, with a chilling description of the religious fervor animating the faith-based army of Trump believers. Heaven help us.

Rituals of Christian worship have become embedded in conservative rallies, as praise music and prayer blend with political anger over vaccines and the 2020 election.

The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right: ‘This Is a Jesus Movement’

Dueling honor codes

Jon A. Shields titled his recent guest essay in the New York Times (which the NYT teased as What Donald Trump Understands About Honor) How Trump’s Brutish Code of Honor Explains His Feud With Liz Cheney. He contrasts the strict honor cultures of the orange brawler from Queens and Liz Cheney, the well-born daughter of (the embodiment of human evil) the aptly named Dick Cheney. To Trump, any defeat is a humiliation that must be avenged to the death. To Cheney, the eyes of history are watching and honor demands a principled response to something like the drumbeat of treason.

Beneath the surface of their honor feud lurk clashing understandings of political ambition. Unlike Mr. Trump, Ms. Cheney is seeking the esteem of future generations by doing what’s in the public interest even if she is cast out of office for doing so. Ms. Cheney told a Wyoming paper that just moments before her fellow Republicans pushed her out of House leadership, she warned them “that history was watching.”

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, is so loyal to his narrow code that he lacks even the theory of mind to understand Ms. Cheney’s ambition. For him, losing any contest is always dishonorable because it tarnishes his reputation as a strongman. Hence, his enduring fixation with ratings, polling and the “stolen” 2020 election. It’s also why he asked Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” as they stood over the graves at Arlington National Cemetery, according to reporting in The Atlantic.

What Donald Trump Understands About Honor

It’s not intuitive to picture a man without honor living by an inviolable, if crude, honor code, the “honor code” of a lying, vindictive sore loser, but there you go. The guest essay provides pretty good description of dueling honor codes representing higher and lower motives for two ugly, largely similar worldviews. Two sides of a very grim honor coin.

US Covid cases down 165,000 a day in last few days, deaths still rising

This one is still hard for me to get my head around. I have to reach out to my doctor friends for some insight into how these seemingly irreconcilable counter-narratives are playing out.

Since Dec. 1, when health officials announced the first Omicron case in the United States, the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is at least 63 percent higher than in any of these other large, wealthy nations, according to a New York Times analysis of mortality figures.

Source

Somewhat characteristically, the Grey Lady makes no mention of our broken, largely privatized, healthcare system or the prevalence of a powerful anti-science party that uses a giant, unregulated mass megaphone to conflate taking a vaccination with obsequiously bending the knee to tyranny, but interesting article, as far as it goes.