A decaying bridge tells everyone that "government" is incompetent

I bought my desk in the early 1990s. I bought this particular model because it was designed to hold a computer. It’s a rolltop model, though I haven’t been able to lower that top practically since I bought it. When I say it is designed for a computer I mean: * Cubby drawers designed for computer storage: 5.25” floppies and 3.5” diskettes. * A ventilated area for the pizza box shaped computer. * A central bay for the cathode ray tube monitor. * Pull out side boards with inset mouse pads designed for good traction against the ball in the mouse. * A place for the printer that can be closed away. * A built in surge protector with switches for the various components. * A pull out tray for the keyboard. As for all those great features: * I threw out the last of my floppies and diskettes 20 years ago and my current computer doesn’t have a way to read them. The previous computer probably didn’t either * Computers are no longer designed into pizza box shaped packages so the computer tower takes up space in the knee hole, as does the internet modem. * Neither of my two flat-screen monitors fit into the monitor bay. * The mouse doesn’t have a ball. It has a laser. And it has a hard time with the nearly featureless mousepad, though it did reasonably well on the wood grain around the pad. There just isn’t enough of that. * The printer doesn’t fit into the place designed for it. * Routing wires up to the surge protector is difficult so I have a second surge protector on the floor plugged into the first one, which has a switch I can reach. A second surge protector was easier to handle than several extension chords. * I do have the keyboard on the tray designed for it, though that is about the only thing I use as intended. In spite of all that it’s a beautiful piece of furniture. I got tired of the mousepad problems so went out yesterday and got a new one. It is quite thin so I easily laid it over the built in one (though not quite the same size). The cursor on the screen does a better job of following the mouse, so the new pad is worth the $10. Alas, it is more slick, so clicking on a mouse button sometimes also moves the mouse. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported on election situation in Alabama. The Republicans there have already passed their voter suppression laws and included a provision that the local GOP officials can overturn results they don’t like. Some of those local GOP officials are already acting by ousting election board officials they believe will be troublesome. One of those is Lonnie Hollis, a black woman on the Troup County election board. One troublesome thing she did in the 2020 election was to open a polling place in a black church. Yes, Democrats and democracy advocates are alarmed. Hunter of Kos discussed a New York Times story about the spectacular mismanagement of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the nasty guy. Ben Carson was the head of HUD, surely chosen because he knew nothing of the subject. That left party hacks in charge who made sure HUD did very little. Marcia Fudge, the current head of HUD will need a long time to set the organization back to doing what it should. Though the nasty guy oversaw HUD (more accurately, didn’t oversee), the emphasis on dysfunctional government started way before he took over the Oval Office. Wrote Hunter:

The demand that government be defunded, destaffed, broken up, its tasks given to for-profit corporate enterprises and the withheld funds be distributed to the wealthy, has been the Republican demand for, at this point, decades. It is the reason there has never been a serious Republican health care reform proposal, even as the party swore up and down it was inches from having one. It is the reason that Republicans are, as we speak, demanding a continued defunding of national infrastructure, even during crisis. If the roads are paved, citizens will be happy with government. If the United States gets the sort of mass transit options or high-speed internet access that citizens in other nations take for granted, Americans will like it. A decaying bridge is a signal to all that "government," in whole, is incompetent. Nobody's going to agree to privatize every road and highway in America, putting up toll booths and letting a future Amazon of infrastructure decide where you can go and how much it will cost you to get there, if things are going well.

A few days ago I mentioned that someone started pushing the idea that if the Republicans take over the House in 2022 the nasty guy could be named Speaker. Kos of Kos reported someone mentioned that to the nasty guy and he declared it “very interesting.” However, since then he has mentioned the idea to Kevin McCarthy many times. McCarthy is the current House Minority Leader, the guy who would normally be Speaker if Republicans regained the House. Kos wrote:

As mentioned in my last piece, the conservative fantasy is that Trump takes the job for 100 days, impeaches Joe Biden just because, and then quits to run for president. Does it make sense? No. Would Trump ever actually do any work? No. Would he get his shit together in 100 days to actually accomplish anything? No. Would anything even remotely looking like “policy” happen in that time? No. All this points to the conservative inability to quit Trump.

Kos then discussed another aspect. There are many nasty guy supporters who have voted only when the nasty guy is actually on the ballot (they didn’t show up in 2017, 2018, and 2019). Perhaps this is a way to imply he’s on the ballot without him running for anything.

Meanwhile, could McCarthy look any more pathetic? He could’ve ditched the Trump albatross after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Now he’s sitting there looking like a chump as Trump tells him—repeatedly—that he wants his job.

Two weeks ago I wrote about a cartogram that stretched state boundaries to show senators per million people in the state. I recently went looking for other interesting cartograms and found some in World Mapper. Of interest are two on this page. The first shows the size of a country based on its CO2 emissions with the color of the country based on emissions per capita. China is the largest in emissions, but America, also large, is highest in emissions per capita – America’s per capita emissions is twice China’s. Also large are India (though low in per capita) and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. Africa has been shrunk down to almost nothing except for South Africa and the countries along the Mediterranean. South America is pretty small. Europe is rather large with Germany the largest. Two more maps show emissions increase 1990-2015 and decrease in the same time. In the increase map China is huge, India is large, as is the Middle East. In the decrease map the largest area is Europe, especially Ukraine and other Soviet satellites. In this case the cause of decline is the fall of the Soviet Union and the halting of the most polluting industries. Another World Mapper cartogram of interest shows the spread of COVID. It’s in two parts, the first has a link to the second. The first shows the case map in April and July 2020, the second shows cumulative cases as of Jan 1, 2021. The second part also has an animation of the day by day spread over all of 2020. Of course, at the beginning China is huge. But soon Europe and America bloom in size. World Mapper has over 1100 cartograms on a variety of subjects. Under economy I saw cartograms for wealth in the year 1500 and distribution of McDonald’s Restaurants (very few in Africa). Ibram X. Kendi wrote the book Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. I have the book, though I haven’t read it yet. Kendi spoke with NPR host Steve Inskeep about the Republican assault on teaching about race. They also talked about his latest book Stamped for Kids, a youth version of the book. Then Kendi listed six books about race appropriate for children and young adults. I’ll have to add a few to my list of books to buy. Sravya Tadepalli, writing for Kos Prism discussed the importance of reflective and inclusive literature in school classrooms. Most books taught in English and literature classes are written about white men and feature white men. A few are written by white women. Students today think many are outdated and dull. It would be so much better if there was also literature by a variety of people of color. The benefit of such books include: If the book is about the culture of a person of color the student is much more invested in the story and that boosts reading comprehension. These students are usually behind in literacy That also boosts understanding of English when it is a second language. And, of course, the white students gain an understanding what their peers are going through. Though quite helpful a diversity of authors in a classroom does not solve problems caused by school segregation, disparities in school discipline, and insufficient school funding.