Links: 'Big Lie'-believing election candidates; Koch on pandemic eviction prohibitions

Links: 'Big Lie'-believing election candidates; Koch on pandemic eviction prohibitions 

Everyone thought the Georgia Secretary of State would be a disaster. He was not. These officials due ministerial things and their actions are very public and very reviewable in federal court. There are many things to be concerned about, but this is not it. We need to bring back pre-clearance for every state which passes voting restrictions. They should make it automatic. Once a state loses a violation under section 3, they should go on a section 2 (pre-clearance) list for a certain number of federal election cycles. 

There is a threshold where we know a hot period occurs (1.5% CO2). We are not near that. There is a range where there might be effects. We are nowhere near the former and are not sure when the latter gets dire, although there is evidence that we may have passed it. In general, we are in an ice age between glacial periods. If man-made warming spared us a glacial period, then hurrah for warming. The question is, where is the line and what is really normal? We have not been keeping records for long enough to know (yet). That 40% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the last 200 years have occurred in the last 17 correlates with the growth in population since then, as well as the industrialization of China and India.

A sense of home has nothing to do with Apartheid in Israel. It is a sense of group identity on both sides. Ending legal discrimination is only the second step. Step one is to end asymmetric warfare. Step two is ending official discrimination (something the US only did in the 50s and 60s). Step three is social and economic equality. The U.S. is nowhere close. Demographics may or may not change that in the U.S. It has not helped in South Africa and won't help in Israel unless it is really serious about being a western democracy rather than claiming it is.

Trickle down is not at all plausible and both sides of the GOP (and the pro-life movement) are all about getting poor White people stirred up so that they vote against their economic self-interest. Reactionary social policy has always been the tool of conservative economic, religious and political power. The only answer is to make the wealthy realize that inequality is not in their interests (or their children's) or to make it impossible for them to justify it's extent. The key to this is to get agreement on who owes the debt and reveal who owns it at the class level.

Eviction moratoria cannot last forever. The injustice is letting the Federal Reserve buy up troubled bonds without directing landlords to start forgiving rent. Absent that, the government should have made it clear that rent delayed is not rent forgiven. Anyone with rent owed who did not sink both stimulus checks into getting current on their rent needs to start packing.

Bishop Pop Rocks probably still believes that Humani Generis is infallible dogma. You can't fix stupid. Catholic sexual teaching has been in the realm of Group Think since the fourth century.  Science recently decided that masking was more important than recognizing the first round of COVID symptoms because they did not want to say that the virus was a cold, even though it obviously started as one. As for Extraterrestrials, the recent 60 Minutes report has entirely upset the apple cart. We are not alone. I am sure Paprocki is probably freaking out about this. It upends his Adam and Eve world view.