12.31 Betty White dies at 99.
12.31 Becky Hammon named head coach of the Las Vegas Aces
12.31 “”You should be ashamed.”
12.30 Francis Collins, quoted in the Washington Post: “Maybe we underinvested in research on human behavior. . . I never imagined a year ago, when those vaccines were just proving to be fantastically safe and effective, that we would still have 60 million people who had not taken advantage of them because of misinformation and disinformation that somehow dominated all of the ways in which people were getting their answers.”
12.30 NY Post: “`”[Hank] Sheinkopf — who helped then-state Comptroller Carl McCall fend off a Democratic primary challenge by Andrew Cuomo during the 2002 gubernatorial race — said that if the former governor “is able to get past all the criminal allegations,” he’s more than likely to reenter politics. “What’s left? That he has a loud mouth and he threatens people? This guy is not someone you count out. I helped take him out in 2002 and he came back stronger than ever. He’s the Dracula of American politics.”
12.29 Ghislaine Maxwell is found guilty on five counts in her trial for luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by the American millionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell faces years in prison
12.28 John Madden dies at 85
12.28 Harry Reid dies at 82
12.26 Desmond Tutu dies at 90
12.26 Washington Post: Trump critics warn that a stronger MAGA wing in Congress threatens democracy. “We’re looking at a nihilistic Mad Max hellscape. It will be all about the show of 2024 to bring Donald Trump back into power. … They will impeach Biden, they will impeach Harris, they will kill everything,” said Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican strategist who is sharply critical of Trump.
12.25 NASA launches the James Webb Space Telescope, the biggest, most powerful, most expensive ($10 billion) telescope in history. Webb will help scientists understand how early galaxies formed and grew, detect possible signatures of life on other planets, watch the birth of stars, study black holes from a different angle, and likely discover unexpected truths.
12.23 Grace Mirabella dies at 92.
12.23 Joan Didion dies at 87. “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of the narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
12.22 The War Room
12.16 Mitch McConnell on the 1/6 committee: “The fact-finding is inter` esting; we’re all going to be watching it. It was a horrendous event, and I think what they are seeking to find out is something the public needs to know.”
12.14 Axios: The share of religiously unaffiliated Americans nearly doubled over the past 15 years to 29%, a Pew Research Center survey finds. Christians of all varieties make up 63% of the adult population — down from 75% a decade ago. Between the lines: Most of the increase in what Pew calls “nones” comes from the decline of Protestantism. 40% of U.S. adults are Protestants, down from 52% in 2007. The big picture: The religiously unaffiliated are no longer crowded in coastal cities, Santa Clara adjunct professor Elizabeth Drescher told AP. They’re now spread across all regions, age ranges, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds.
12.14 Gov. Cuomo ordered to return $5.1 million from book sale to NYS
12.14 David Brooks in The Atlantic: “Conservatism’s profound insight is that it’s impossible to build a healthy society strictly on the principle of self-interest. It’s an illusion, as T. S. Eliot put it, to think that a society in which people don’t have to be good can thrive. Life is essentially a moral enterprise, and the health of your community will depend on how well it does moral formation—how well it nurtures ordered inner lives and helps balance sentiments, desires, and motivations.”
12.14 David Brooks in The Atlantic: “Every worldview has the vices of its virtues. Conservatives are supposed to be epistemologically modest—but in real life, this modesty can turn into a brutish anti-intellectualism, a contempt for learning and expertise. Conservatives are supposed to prize local community—but this orientation can turn into narrow parochialism, can produce xenophobic and racist animosity toward immigrants, a tribal hostility toward outsiders, and a paranoid response when confronted with even a hint of diversity and pluralism. Conservatives are supposed to cherish moral formation—but this emphasis can turn into a rigid and self-righteous moralism, a tendency to see all social change as evidence of moral decline and social menace. Finally, conservatives are supposed to revere the past—but this reverence for what was can turn into an abject deference to whoever holds power.”
12.13 Gary Abernathy in the Washington Post: “White people may well admit that bias and prejudice are built into the system, as long as they’re not blamed for a foundation that was laid long before they were born.. . . . It’s often suggested that White Americans owe something to Black Americans, or that White people should live with guilt over their “White privilege.” But White privilege is not a privilege at all. It’s the range of opportunities that are promised to all Americans. When we fall short of delivering on that promise, it’s incumbent not just on White Americans, but on the United States as a nation — as an institution — to rectify that imbalance. . . .Critical race theory should be welcomed in schools to the degree that it introduces the overlooked contributions of African Americans and the institutional racism that has existed since our nation’s founding — within a curriculum that stops short of sermonizing to today’s White Americans or force-feeding politically driven solutions.”
12.13 George Will in The Washington Post: For perhaps a majority of Trump’s voters, the former president’s bad-boy persona was the point. For them, policies mattered less than experiencing through him the cultural catharsis of offending those they find offensive. Among the 36 percent of registered voters with a college degree, 56 percent voted for Biden. Republicans need to regain ground with this cohort without forfeiting votes on the other side of the “diploma divide.”
12.12 Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado: “Everybody had more than enough opportunity to get vaccinated. At this point, if you haven’t been vaccinated, it’s really your own darn fault. . . Those who get sick, it’s almost entirely their own darn fault.”
12.11 Anne Rice dies at 80.
12.10 Mike Nesmith dies at 78
12.9 Lina Wertmüller dies at 93
12.9 Jim Malatras resigns
12.7 Plutarch: “They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view, something which leaves off as soon as that end is reached. It is not a public chore, to be got over with. It is a way of life. It is the life of a domesticated political and social creature who is born with a love for public life, with a desire for honor, with a feeling for his fellows.”
12.7 Carl Sandburg: “I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes. I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down, a sun dropped in the west. I tell you there is nothing in the world, only an ocean of tomorrows, a sky of tomorrows.”
12.7 Axios: “The super-rich are getting stupid rich. New data out today shows the share of global wealth held by the richest slice of humanity swelled by almost a full percentage point during the pandemic. The top 0.01% of individuals now hold about 11% of the world’s wealth, compared to just over 10% in 2020, according to the “World Inequality Report 2022,” written by Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. Why it matters: Governments around the world spent vast sums to battle the pandemic, fueling massive appreciation in stocks and real estate. The increase in billionaires’ share of wealth from 2020 to 2021 was the steepest on record, the report says. Zoom out: The study found poverty increased sharply in countries with weak welfare coverage. But massive government support in the U.S. and Europe mitigated some impact on lower earners.
12.6 Amid strong, swirling winds, the Pats beat the Bills 14-10. Mac Jones attempts just three passes, completing two. Belicheck!
12.5 Bob Dole dies at 98
12.5 Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen in The Atlantic: “Think back on a time in your life before you regularly worked for pay. Recall, if you can, an expanse of unscheduled time that was, in whatever manner, yours. What did you actually like to do? Not what your parents said you should do, not what you felt as if you should do to fit in, not what you knew would look good on your application for college or a job. The answer might be spectacularly simple: You liked riding your bike with no destination in mind, making wild experiments in the kitchen, playing around with eyeshadow, writing fan fiction, playing cards with your grandfather, lying on your bed and listening to music, trying on all your clothes and making ridiculous outfits, thrifting, playing Sims for hours, obsessively sorting baseball cards, playing pickup basketball, taking photos of your feet with black-and-white film, going on long drives, learning to sew, catching bugs, skiing, playing in a band, making forts, harmonizing with other people, putting on mini-plays—whatever it was, you did it because you wanted to. Not because it would look interesting if you posted it on social media, or because it somehow optimized your body, or because it would give you better things to talk about at drinks, but because you took pleasure in it.
12.4 CNN fires Chris Cuomo.
12.3 Ginny and I tour the Hart-Cluett House in Troy.
12.2 Washington Post: The American Enterprise Institute’s Karlyn Bowman has compiled an indispensable guide to Americans’ attitudes toward abortion since Roe was decided in 1973. It shows that roughly half of the country believes having an abortion is morally wrong, similar to the share of people who say they are pro-life vs. pro-choice. But it also shows that between 61 and 68 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, according to polls conducted within the past year by the Pew Research Center, Quinnipiac University and the Public Religion Research Institute. Indeed, roughly half of the country thinks that a woman should be able to have an abortion for any reason, including if she doesn’t think she can afford another child or simply doesn’t want more children. That doesn’t mean that the views of abortion rights activists are uniformly accepted. While clear majorities favor abortion rights in the first trimester of pregnancy, majorities oppose abortion in the second trimester and roughly 80 percent oppose it in the third trimester. Only 43 percent favored a national law protecting abortion rights in a September Quinnipiac poll; 41 percent said abortion should be left to the states while 11 percent favored a national law to restrict abortion access. Clearly, the closer an unborn child is to birth, the more the public supports that child’s right to life.
12.1 Supreme Court hears arguments on challenge to Roe. vs. Wade. Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned whether the legitimacy of the Supreme Court would endure if it overturned abortion rights: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible.