5.26 A Dutch court mandated that Shell reduce its emissions by 45% by 2030, in line with the Paris Agreement.
5.26 Ginny and I have dinner at the Albany Pump Station. Not good.
5.23 Lunch with Paul and Anne in New Paltz.
5.21 Marjorie Taylor Green: “You know, we can look back in a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens — so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”
5.21 Yanks turn round-the-horn triple play in the top of the ninth, then Gleyber Torres‘ walk off single sends NY home with 2-1 win over Chisox.
5.21 Allison Schrager in Bloomberg: “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” is the title Damien Hirst gave to a shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde. He called it art. Steven Cohen agreed and paid at least $8 million to put it in his house. Not everyone agreed it was art, but Steve Cohen did, and Steve Cohen spends a lot on art, and so the shark was art, and it was worth $8 million. Bitcoin is kind of like the shark in formaldehyde, writes Allison Schrager. It has no intrinsic value. As we have said here repeatedly, nobody in their right mind would use it to pay for pizzas or Teslas or anything other than desperately needed illegal goods, services or ransoms. Like the preserved shark, a Bitcoin is worth (checks Terminal) $37,000, er, (checks Terminal again) $43,000, er, (checks Terminal again) $32,000 only because Bitcoin fanatics and traders have collectively decided it is worth (checks Terminal again) $45,000. Cruelly, Allison compares Bitcoin not only to dubious contemporary art, but also to Beanie Babies — fad objects that became basically worthless despite their intentional scarcity.
5.19 Corey Kluber of the Yankees no-hits Texas in a 2-1 victory. This is the sixth no-hitter of the season. The modern record is 7; all-time record is 8.
5.16 Navy pilot Ryan Graves on CBS’s “60 Minutes”, on how frequently he saw UFOs in restricted airspace off the Atlantic Coast: “Every day. Every day for at least a couple years.”
5.16 The Wall Street Journal reports Board members for Microsoft determined in 2020 that the company’s co-founder, Bill Gates, needed to step down from his own role on the board amid an investigation into a past affair with a female Microsoft employee. The company hired a law firm to investigate the claims after an engineer wrote a letter in 2019 that detailed a prior relationship Gates had with a female employee. Gates resigned from the board in March 2020, as well as the board of Berkshire Hathaway, saying at the time he did so “to dedicate more time to philanthropic priorities.”
5.13 CDC says fully vaccinated Americans no longer need masks indoors or outdoors in most cases
5.12 House Republicans ousted Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership position Wednesday.
5.12 Rangers fire David Quinn
5.6 Paulina Porizkova, age 55
5.5 EJ Dionne in the Washington Post: “[W]hat’s really bold is Biden’s effort to create a stream of revenue through higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations that would support his efforts on education, child care, infrastructure and more help for low-income families. Biden’s tax program, including an enforcement effort to make it harder for corporations and the well-to-do to evade what they owe, is designed to break a vicious cycle. Since the early 1990s, Democrats coming into office after a GOP era have had to raise taxes just to ease deficits Republican tax cuts created in previous administrations. Then, when Republicans came back into power, they enacted more tax cuts (often accompanied by higher levels of military spending). “One of the problems the Democrats have in fixing the budget,” Scott said, “is if we fix it and a Republican administration comes in, they’ll wreck it.” This process has contributed to a revenue shortfall over time. Federal revenue as a share of gross domestic product has dropped from 20 percent in 2000 to 16.3 percent in 2019. A calculation the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) made at my request found that if federal revenue returned to 20 percent of GDP — a long way from socialism, you might notice — the government would collect some $680 billion more in 2022 than it would under current law. Biden’s tax increases amount to just 1.2 percent of GDP over the next decade, and they are confined to the very rich for good reason: The income gains at the top of the economy over the past four decades dwarf those of everyone else (and this was likely aggravated during the pandemic). According to the CBO, incomes in the top 0.01 percent of households grew 601 percent between 1979 and 2017. The middle three-fifths of Americans gained just 49 percent.
5.5. Two days after the Capitals; Tom Wilson bodyslammed the Rangers’ Artemi Panarin to the ice, ending his season, the following happened: Wilson received an anemic $5000 fine for his infraction; MSG ownership fired president John Davidson and GM Jeff Gordon; the team criticized NHL disciplinarian for `dereliction of duty’; the NHL fined the Rangers $250,000 for going public with its criticism; and the two teams, in a rematch, spent the night brawling, though rather ineffectually.
5.5 Mitch McConnell: “One hundred percent of my focus is standing up to this administration. What we have in the United States Senate is total unity from Susan Collins to Ted Cruz in opposition to what the new Biden administration is trying to do to this country,”
5.5 John Means of the Orioles fired a no-hitter against the Mariners, striking out 12 hitters with no walks on 113 pitches. The only Seattle base runner reached in the third inning, when Sam Haggerty struck out and advanced to first on a wild pitch. He was then caught stealing. Means is the only pitcher in MLB history to throw a non-perfect game no-hitter in which no opposing batter reached base via walk, hit by pitch or error.
5.4 Sarah Jones in New York: “First and foremost, any system of taxation is about values. . . The values that the U.S. should prioritize are a valorization of wealth, the encouragement of saving, and the encouragement of children.” Precarity tends to discourage childbearing, an old fact reilluminated by the pandemic baby bust. Cowen’s perspective doesn’t have to line up with observable reality to be worth noting. He merely expresses a view that is common on the right: that the poor are in need of a good lesson. The wealthy learned well and thus have something to teach everyone else; they deserve protection from the tax code and from marauding crusaders like Joe Biden. As an idea, trickle-down economics is certainly in danger; the stagnation of the middle class and the Trump administration’s authorization of cash payments to the public are both serious threats to its survival. Yet certain aspects retain their appeal. The impulse to valorize wealth isn’t going to disappear from the right. It may undergo permutations, reemerge with new branding and different language, but it is too integral to the conservative position to die.