“Not that this is an exhaustive list, but here are 30 simple shared truths I discovered at my 30th reunion of Harvard’s class of 1988.” Having just attended my own 30th reunion (not at Harvard), I endorse this list.
Electric cars are great, but we will need more than that to really fight climate change.
The case for making Congress bigger.
“Younger Americans are better than older Americans at telling factual news statements from opinions”.
“Why mention hias right now? Because its Jewish background (and centrality in the family history of many Jews in America) and its current work in trying to deal with this era’s tired, poor, and desperate were apparently part of the motive that led Saturday’s murderer to gun down people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.”
“The Soros stuff is just one of many manifestations of the the grand anti-Semitic trope (cosmopolitan Jews are destroying traditional nations) that pervades the alt-right and shades into the respectable right.”
If you’ve never read Eugene Patterson’s 1963 column about the Birmingham church bombing, you should.
“But Sears was also the nation’s highest-profile discriminator against women. The corporation should be remembered for its poor treatment of workers, its stubbornness when confronted with new sex equality laws, and how the practices it pioneered still shape the American workplace.”
“But here’s the thing: It isn’t true. Republicans are lying about their position on preexisting conditions, and voters have a right to know that.”
“Partisan politics aside, this whole meme involving a possible military response to refugees besieging the United States reminded me of something … and it finally hit me: It was pretty close to the central premise of The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail’s racist French novel of the 1970s”.
RIP, Herb Remington, steel guitarist for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and the inventor of the Remington Steel Guitar.
“The attorneys for one of the extremists found guilty of plotting in 2016 to bomb Somali immigrants in Kansas floated a novel defense in an effort to obtain a lighter sentence for their client: blame Donald Trump.”
A documentary about Prince is in the works.
“A Doctor Who Died In The Pittsburgh Shooting Is Being Remembered As A Hero To Patients At The Start Of The AIDS Crisis.”
RIP, Willie McCovey, Hall of Fame first baseman for the San Francisco Giants.
Possibly the most amazing XKCD comic ever.
“But to me, the most depressing aspect of this whole thing (now that I have sufficiently buried the lede for this post) is WHY they thought it would work.”
The case for making the House of Representatives bigger: the writer does not mention another advantage of this plan — it dilutes the non-democratic aspects of the Electoral College in Presidential elections. If you raised the Lower House to 1600 members, for example, it would shrink the relative importance of the Senate in determining each state’s number of electors. For example, California in 2017 would be entitled to 52 or 53 representatives in a redistricting done with today’s House, and its 55 electors would be 17 or 18 times Wyoming’s 3. With 1600 members, California’s electors rise in number to 197, or about 39 times Wyoming’s 5. Without a Constitutional Amendment you have made the Presidential candidates focus more on courting people rather than grasslands.