The Wrongologist – Page 57 – Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

A Deep Dive Into the PBS/Marist Poll

The Daily Escape:

Ashuelot River, Keene NH – January 2022 photo by Betsy Zimmerli

Much has been said about the January 6 attempted coup at the US Capitol and the reaction to it by Americans. Let’s take a dive into two of the key findings in the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll survey that was published on Jan. 3, 2022. Marist surveyed 1,400 adults between December 11th and December 13th, 2021, of which 1,310 were registered voters.

When asked about whether the Select Congressional Committee’s hearings to investigate the events at the US Capitol on January 6^th is appropriate, a 62% majority of Americans believe it is. Here’s the question that was asked:

“A Select Congressional Committee is holding hearings to investigate the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Based on what you have seen or heard, which comes closer to your view?”

Here are the results:

That 35% believe the Committee’s work is a witch hunt is consistent with most findings where Republicans are forced to choose between mutually exclusive answers, and one answer clearly doesn’t support their Party’s viewpoint. They are in the clear minority.

A second question, asking whether what happened on Jan. 6 at the Capitol was an insurrection, a protest, or an unfortunate event? The answers were all over the map. Here is the question asked in the survey:

“When it comes to the events on January 6th, when a crowd entered the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, and disrupted the election certification process, which of the following best reflects your thoughts?”

Overall, 49% of Americans called it an insurrection, while 25% believed “it was a political protest protected under the first amendment.” Another 19% said “it was an unfortunate event but it’s in the past, so no need to worry about it anymore.”

This shows how divided politically we are: 49% call it an insurrection while 44% say it wasn’t something to be concerned about.

Democrats (89%) overwhelmingly consider it to be an insurrection while a plurality of Republicans (45%) say it was a political protest. And an additional 35% of Republicans think it was unfortunate but is not something we need to worry about in the future.

Here are the percentages of those demographic groups that agreed with the idea that “It was an insurrection and a threat to democracy”:

Greater than 50%:

95% of Biden supporters

89% of Democrats

66% of college graduates

61% of people who live in the Northeast

61% of big city residents

59% of Gen Z/Millennials

56% of suburban residents

53% of women

52% of nonwhites

51% of small city residents

50% of people who live in the West

Less than 50%:

49% of whites

49% of older Americans (75-plus)

48% of Boomers

47% of people who live in the South

45% of men

44% of people who live in the Midwest

43% of small town residents

42% of Latinos

39% of those without a college degree

39% of Gen Xers

31% of rural residents

10% of Republicans

8% of Trump supporters

Wrongo finds reason to be optimistic in these results. The fact that 62% of Americans think that the work of the Select Committee is appropriate indicates that their findings will be broadly accepted by voters. Let’s hope they publish them soon.

It is also an optimistic finding that 89% of Democrats, and 43% of independents define the events of Jan. 6 as an insurrection. Suburban voters and white college educated women – two voting blocs that supported Biden are also closely aligned with Democrats on those feelings.

The poll also found that 53% of Americans still say Trump was at fault for what happened at the Capitol. This view has softened since Marist polled it on January 7, 2021, when 63% of Americans said they blamed Trump. That’s consistent with the continuing Right wing narrative about Jan. 6, saying that it was really just protected speech.

Overall, there are two necessary steps to securing our democracy.

First, what comes out of the investigative work by the DOJ and the House Select Committee will be accepted by the majority of Americans. That means any indictments of politicians that come from either will be broadly supported.

Second, the Congress needs to legislate to ensure that all votes are counted and that those counts are reflected fairly in the results in every state and cannot changed by partisan election officials. That is an outcome that Pelosi and Schumer must deliver in the first half of 2022.

We have to hope that both can happen before the November mid-terms.

Saving The Republic By Destroying It

The Daily Escape:

New Year’s Day, Pike National Forest, near Colorado Springs, CO – January 2022 photo by Daniel Forster

“It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.” – Tom Stoppard

Tomorrow we will observe the anniversary of the attempted coup at the US Capitol. For the most part, in response, America will do nothing. The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman wrote last month,

“Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.”

There are tens of millions of Americans who believe that the 2020 election was magically stolen from Trump, and tens of millions who believe violence is the answer to resolving that problem. A new NPR/Ipsos poll finds that 64% of Americans believe US democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.”

The poll found one-third of Trump voters say the attack on the Capitol was actually carried out by opponents of Donald Trump, including Antifa and government agents, a baseless conspiracy theory that has been promoted by conservative media ever since the attack, even though it has been debunked.

Is the US careening toward a second civil war? Republicans seem to be willing to destroy the Republic to save it.

Stephen Marche published an excerpt from his new book in the Guardian. He points out that the Right has recognized that the American political system is in collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with far-right factions that want to subvert the vote-counting process.

Marche says that two things are happening at the same time. The American Right has abandoned its faith in government. The American Left has been slower on the uptake, but they are starting to figure out that the American political system which we call a democracy is less deserving of the name as each year passes.

So, the Right is already preparing for a breakdown of law and order. They’re preparing because they’re the ones fomenting the breakdown.

A University of Virginia analysis of census projections shows that by 2040, 30% of the population will control 68% of the Senate, and eight states will contain half of the US population.

The conservative project to achieve permanent minority rule long precedes Trump’s efforts to nullify the election in 2020. It’s being further codified into law in states across the country. The Senate’s built-in malapportionment gives advantages overwhelmingly to white, non-college educated voters. The federal system as constituted no longer represents the will of the majority of the American people.

This shouldn’t surprise you, since we continually elect people uncommitted to making government work. And surprise, it doesn’t. VOX’s Zach Beauchamp observes:

“America’s dysfunction stems, in large part, from an outdated political system that creates incentives for intense partisan conflict and legislative gridlock. That system may well be near the point of collapse. Reform is certainly a possibility. But the most meaningful changes to our system have been won only after bloodshed and struggle, on the fields of Gettysburg and in the streets of Birmingham. It is possible, maybe even likely, that America will not be able to veer from its dangerous path absent more eruptions and upheavals — that things will get worse before they get better.”

Can this be avoided? Unclear. The Democrats have done an excellent job in ensuring they have little bench strength. Who do they have who is capable of succeeding Biden?

The Republicans have lobotomized their talent base. Trump created an environment where any number of lunatics can claim followers that vaguely fit under the Republican banner, while the mainstream Right fails to control either the Party or its narrative.

It’s still possible for America to implement a modern electoral system, restore the legitimacy of the courts, reform its police forces, and alter its tax code to address inequality. All of these changes are possible.

However, we can’t simply hope that everything will work out; it won’t. If democracy is to survive, the US must start over. It must rediscover its revolutionary spirit. But who’s willing to do that? We seem to feel that it’s futile to expect that we can change anything.

The upshot is that people are angry. Many are checking out, no longer caring about what happens. How will we save the American project if we aren’t willing to fight for it?

What happens if it no longer matters who is running for president next time around?

We may find out.

Monday Wake Up Call – January 3, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Nathrop , CO – December 2021 photo by Haji Mahmood

“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been” – Rainer Maria Rilke

Wrongo hasn’t published predictions since 2018, because while it became increasingly hard to imagine that things would get worse, every year they did. Every year. It’s his fervent hope that despite evidence, things won’t turn out to be even more terrible in 2022.

This year, maybe we should avoid saying “Happy New Year!” in favor of “Hopeful New Year.” Let’s simply resist saying “We’re doomed!”, because there’s always reason for hope, even in the darkest times.

Pandemics do not go on forever. Even before vaccinations, eventually everyone who was susceptible was infected. Covid won’t be any different. Ever so slowly, more people will get vaccinated, and better treatments will be found. We should remain hopeful that 2022 will see the pandemic fade.

Our economy is humming along. We have a normal President who displays empathy and common decency, and (rarely) zero common sense. But we’re going to elect a new House in ten months, and most polls show the forecasted outcome to be Republicans in control.

If that happens, any progress made so far in the post-Trump era will end. If we are to avoid that, the Democratic Party will need more than a fresh coat of paint and a kitchen renovation, because the Party looks a lot like grandma’s house just before it goes on the market.

That doesn’t leave a lot of time for a makeover. The NYT said it best in its “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now” editorial:

“Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day….It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.”

The violence every American witnessed at the Capitol one year ago demonstrated the will of Republicans to take over our democracy. And while the select committee in the House promises a detailed accounting and, presumably, some sort of referral for action to the DOJ, time is short.

Time is short for all of us.

In state after Republican-controlled state, efforts continue to put in place, under cover of law, mechanisms for Republicans to overturn elections results not to their liking.

So, the Capitol riot is continuing in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court. The fact that half of Americans watched Jan 6 in real time and have concluded that it was a legitimate effort to prevent Biden’s election and to restore Trump to office suggests that the decades-long project of the Right wing is nearly complete, unless we intervene. More from the NYT:

“Democrats aren’t helpless, either. They hold unified power in Washington, for the last time in what may be a long time. Yet they have so far failed to confront the urgency of this moment — unwilling or unable to take action to protect elections from subversion and sabotage.”

That means Democrats must shelve Build Back Better and throw everything they have at voting rights. The mealy mouth discussion by Sens. Manchin and Sinema about what might happen if the filibuster was suspended, is an artful dodge when the threat to democracy is so clear today.

Temporarily suspending the filibuster is not radical; standing on the sidelines and not doing anything to stop Republicans from ending our democracy is radical.

Time to wake up America! Democrats need to force the issue on their leaders. Wrongo’s view is “no money until Voting Rights are passed”. That means zero donations between here and the mid-terms unless Democrats act on voting rights. It means Wrongo replies to every tweet and email solicitation with that message.

To help the Democratic Party wake up, here’s “Wake Up Everybody”, originally by Harold Melvin and The Bluenotes, featuring Teddy Pendergrass. Teddy left the group for his solo career after this album.

Today we listen and watch John Legend’s 2010 cover of the tune, backed by Questlove and the Roots Band along with Melanie Fiona, and Common. The song is as strong today as it was 47 years ago when it was released:

Sample Lyric:

The world won’t get no better
If we just let it be
The world won’t get no better
We gotta change it, yeah, just you and me

Covid’s Junior Year Better Not Suck as Much as Its Sophomore Year

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Baker, viewed from Bellingham, WA after 66” of new snow – December 2021 photo by Randy Small photography

Wrongo tested positive for Covid on Christmas Day, despite being vaxxed and boosted. When he asked if it was Omicron or Delta, the hospital didn’t know, saying that the test might be selected randomly for further genetic testing. That means it’s highly doubtful any facility in Connecticut can separate Delta and Omicron patients. In fact, most places wouldn’t have the resources to do that, even if they wanted to.

So, while recovering here at the Mansion of Wrong, we’ve tried to take the required precautions, including cancelling family events, informing those who we had spent time with earlier that week, and masking indoors. One family friend who was with us last week, just texted to say that his 3.5 year old grandson whom he babysat for after seeing us, just tested positive. It’s rampant.

We are entering year three of Covid, and the pandemic isn’t over, even though most of us believed it would be over by now. Instead, for its junior year, Covid is looking like it may shift from a pandemic to an endemic disease, one we will have to live with, possibly forever.

We have effective vaccines, but a political effort is stoking anti-Vaxx feelings in order to keep the pandemic going. Republican leaders are opposing vaccinations, wearing masks, and social distancing (even though they know these things are very effective). And their followers are well — following, by refusing vaccinations, masks, and social distancing.

Despite Covid having a roughly 2% mortality rate, they seem to be more threatened by a vaccine that has a 0.0022% mortality rate. We can ask why GOP politicians are doing this. Most of them are vaccinated. They know that refusing these measures will make people sick and will likely kill quite a few of the unvaccinated, but they don’t seem to care.

They understand that a continuing pandemic could make Biden a one-term president. A continuing pandemic may help Republicans retake the House and Senate in 2022. Nobody likes a loser, and they think the majority of voters will blame Biden for the continuing pandemic.

The numbers are against Biden. America’s now at 821,000 dead. Unless we get very lucky, in another 100 days, we’ll be somewhere between 920,000 and 1,000,000, because since August, we have averaged more than 1,500 deaths/day. Unless the daily deaths change, we’re headed to a million dead by spring.

Republicans are going to use this fact to attack Biden, saying that he’s handled Covid worse than Trump did, because there are more deaths on his watch.

Republicans have done everything possible to prolong Covid and to slow or prevent the implementation of measures that would have lowered the death toll. It’s like an arsonist complaining about the fire department not putting out fires fast enough. The idea that Covid vaccinations should be treated as a matter of individual consumer preference is absolutely brain-dead Republican nihilism.

The NYT reports that where people are dying of Covid also has changed since vaccines became widely available: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Death rates fell in most counties across the country, and in about one in five counties, the death rate fell by more than half. But in about one in 10 counties, death rates have more than doubled.”

Now, ten percent of counties doesn’t equal ten percent of the population. Here’s the map provided by the Times:

Note the concentration in Kentucky and West Virginia. The latest data from the CDC, based on data from 25 states and cities, shows that the death rate for unvaccinated people is 14 times higher than that for vaccinated people. The article also includes a map where Covid deaths have decreased. You can view it here. In most ways, it fills in the blank areas on the map above with green cones instead of these red cones.

We’ve been at this for two long years. Now starting year three, maddeningly, the issues remain the same: The health care system is running out of resources. People can’t get tested. Some people refuse to help themselves and their neighbors. New variants can emerge in the wild faster than we can develop remedies, particularly when people won’t avail themselves of the remedies we already have.

There will be end of year reports on the good things that happened in 2021. There will be reports on both the good and bad things to come in 2022. One thing that doesn’t seem likely to be in any of those reports is a changed reaction to Covid by Americans.

Time to put 2021 in the dumpster.

Happy New Year! Thanks for riding with Wrongo for another year. Raise a glass, knowing that we will try our damnedest to make sense of it all again in 2022. Let’s close with “Auld Lang Syne” performed by The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin: (hat tip to Monty)

December 26, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Long Beach, CA – December photo by lucasgordonphotography

The year has started to move on from Christmas, but let’s not lose the holiday spirit. Here’s another tune of the season, “Little Drummer Boy”. Wrongo can’t lie, this is a song that he’s hated until he saw this version.

Here, it imagines a young single parent family that faces eviction and is cheered by strangers. It’s performed by Alex Boye’ and features the Genesis Choir:

It reminds us to be kind, not just at Christmas, but all the time.

Christmas Day, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Great Santa Run, Las Vegas NV – December 2021 photo by Ellen Schmidt

(We will be taking the next few days off. Posting will be light and variable until the New Year)

Merry Christmas! You shouldn’t be cruising the internet today, but here you are, and Wrongo thanks you for stopping by. Many say that this is the most wonderful time of the year, but perhaps it’s better that we don’t think about what a roller coaster ride 2021 was for all of us.

Don’t you think that we need a little Christmas after the year we had? The tune “We Need a Little Christmas” is from the musical Mame, which opened on Broadway in 1966. It is sung in the scene when the stock-market crash of 1929 has just happened, and Mame’s deceased brother’s 10-year-old son has been entrusted to her care. She introduces him to her free-wheeling lifestyle, using her favorite saying: “Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death.”

Our economy is fine, but Mame’s saying (above) still sounds right in 2021.

With due respect to the Grateful Dead, what a long, strange trip 2021 has been. The January 6 attempted coup happened less than a year ago. Biden’s Presidency is only 11 months old. The DOJ and 1/6 Committee are working away on an unprecedented case that is way more complicated and difficult than most of us seem to comprehend. So, amid the sudden re-emergence of yet another Covid variant, in this case, Omicron, let’s take a minute to review Biden’s performance.

The Atlantic’s David Frum offers some perspective:

“Relative to its strength in Congress, the Biden administration has proved outstandingly successful. In 11 months, Biden has done more with 50 Democratic senators than Barack Obama did with 57. He signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-relief bill in March 2021….He signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill in November. He signed some 75 executive orders, many of them advancing liberal immigration goals. He’s also won confirmation for some 40 federal judges, more than any first-year president since Ronald Reagan, and twice as many as Donald Trump confirmed in his first year with a 54-vote Senate majority.”

Manchin Hates Data and Poor Kids

The Daily Escape:

Early morning, -10°F, Pagosa Springs, CO – December 2021 photo by Ben Hazlett Photography

Evan Osnos reports in the New Yorker that it was Sen. Manchin who suggested to Biden that the physical infrastructure bill and the social infrastructure bills be split from each other:

“I’m saying we can get an infrastructure deal—a traditional infrastructure deal….Then we come back on human infrastructure and look at the needs.”

Osnos goes on to say that even after the bills were split, and after months of giving ground to Manchin on the social spending particulars, Manchin never budged from an unreconstructed conservative talking point: give Americans too much help, such as extended unemployment insurance, and they will become lazy and dependent. Manchin told reporters:

“I cannot accept our economy, or basically our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality.”

Manchin’s opposition to the Build Back Better (BBB) bill has ended the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) program. According to the Treasury Department, in West Virginia, it delivered payments to 305,000 children. And statewide, 93% of children are eligible for the credit, equaling the highest rate in the country.

ABC reported that Manchin questioned whether parents would misuse CTC payments to buy drugs. In private conversations, Manchin also said he believed paid family leave would be exploited by West Virginians to go hunting during deer season. Bloomberg says he’s wrong:

Looking at the chart, people overwhelmingly have used it for food, rent, utilities and to buy clothing and education. The poorer the family, the greater chance the CTC will be spent on necessities: a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found 91% of households making less than $35,000 per year used the money to pay for food, shelter, clothing and other necessities. They also found that Black and Hispanic families were more likely to use their credits on education-related costs, such as school supplies.

An October survey by the Census Bureau found that 25% of parents with young children also use the credits to pay for child care. Manchin is worried that there will be people gaming the system, and since perfection is unattainable, we shouldn’t be giving these kids and their parents anything.

His attitude is one that many Americans agree with. They think that since they aren’t going hungry, there’s no reason for anyone else to be hungry, either. It’s a vestige of the Protestant work ethic. They think that people like CTC recipients shouldn’t get free stuff, because it is taking something from them.

It’s an ugly, selfish way of looking at life.

America has successfully stigmatized being poor. How many in the bottom quartile of income are conditioned to believe they don’t deserve help? While corporations and the top 1% always lobby for financial assistance, and welcome it when it comes.

There are persistent rumors that Manchin will switch Parties. That shouldn’t be the Democrats’ objective, but to the extent there is a purity test to be a Democrat, it probably includes helping poor children and their struggling parents.

OTOH, the Build Back Better bill isn’t fully dead, nor is the voting rights bill. There’s a whole year left of appointing and legislating before the Republicans (possibly) retake Congress. Maybe we’ll want 50 Senators until then?

Remember that the Senate confirmed President Biden’s 40th federal judicial nominee a week ago, the most judges confirmed in a president’s first year in the last 40 years.

Democrats know that few of those judges would have been confirmed without Manchin voting for cloture to end debate on their nominations. If Manchin were to change Parties and stop voting with the Democrats on procedural issues, almost none of the remaining White House appointments would be filled.

It seems clear that IF some version of BBB does pass the Senate, it won’t include all of the progressive goals. Wrongo assumes that both immigration reform and the CTC may need to be dealt with separately.

What Democrats will then need to decide is whether they’re willing to hold their noses and vote for a bill that includes $500 billion in climate change investments, plus a critical childcare provision, more for health care, and a few other goodies.

Here’s another seasonal tune, “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses from 1981. This year marks 40 years since this holiday classic was released. In the song, the lead singer hints that there is a guy she met at a ski shop that she regrets not having the time to date. Later, she realizes that she must go back to the store, and meets the guy she had wanted to connect with:

Be kind, not just at Christmas, but all the time.

Biden’s Economy is Booming

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise with moon, Utah Lake, UT – December 2021 photo by Karen Lund Larsen

Bloomberg reported on Monday that the US economy is outperforming the world by the biggest margin in the 21st century. Surprisingly, they say that there’s a good reason:

“America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden’s first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years…”

They say that the objective economic data are pretty convincing about the Biden Boom of 2021, notwithstanding the contrary media narrative that seems to be driving poor public opinion. Biden is either in first place compared to recent American presidents, or at number 2 on all the big economic indicators, says Bloomberg’s Matt Winkler:

“Exceptional returns…especially the S&P 500 Index in both absolute terms and relative to its global counterparts, can be attributed to record-low debt ratios enabling companies to reap the biggest profit margins since 1950. Corporate America is booming because the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccination programs and $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan reduced the jobless rate to 4.2% in November from 6.2% in February, continuing an unprecedented rate of decline during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Also, inflation-adjusted GDP surged at an average annual rate of 5.03% in each of the first three quarters of 2021 and is poised to hit 5.6% for the year based on the preliminary estimates of more than 80 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. If that forecast holds up, it would be more than 2.8 times the average performance between 2000 and 2019. And double the average since 1976.

Facing The Music

The Daily Escape:

First snow, New Hampshire creek – December 2021 photo by Betsy Zimmerli

“It’s always been about the music. And when it’s not, it’s about facing the music” – Wrongo

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. It is also Wrongo’s favorite day because he prefers daylight to darkness. This is an optimistic day since every succeeding day for the next six months will bring more daylight to the land.

But Wrongo struggles to see any political daylight at the end of this extremely dark year. Here is a summation of the three events most important to Wrongo in this dark, dark year:

The January 6 aborted coup. Nothing that happened this year can overshadow the effort to subvert our democracy. While it may be doubtful right now that the outcome of the Jan. 6 committee will bring justice for the coup plotters, let’s compare it to the Watergate scandal. Those plotters were held accountable. And Watergate occurred at a time when we didn’t have mobile phone, email, and text message electronic tracing to reveal what had happened. In this Jan. 6 case, proving accountability should be easier. We don’t need to know everything, we just need to know enough to prosecute people. With all the digital information that’s available, that should be an easier job than it was during Watergate.

The recent revelations by the House Select Committee are an encouraging sign because they moved quickly on passing a contempt resolution for a former Congressman, Mark Meadows. The Committee got to tell their story three times in 24 hours. They embellished it with juicy new details (texts from Trump’s family members, Fox News personalities, reporters, members of Congress) every time they told it. If they can keep that up through the early part of next year, maybe we’ll start getting somewhere with this.

Ending the Forever War. Biden was crushed by the media and the public for walking away from Afghanistan and the subsequent chaos around the pull-out, but it was the right thing to do. Nearly 2500 US service members were killed, 20,698 were wounded, and more than $2.2 trillion in American taxpayer funds were spent on warfighting, reconstructing programs, building the Afghan National Security Forces, and promoting good governance.

In the end, we have nothing to show for our time there except for more national debt and soldiers who will need care for the rest of their lives. We deserve a full and complete accounting of our 20 years in Afghanistan. After all, it’s another military defeat that requires a fundamental examination to ensure that we never again jump into a country when we fail to understand their social and cultural dynamics.

Losing the Covid war. We’ve failed as a country to work together to beat the virus variants, despite having a vaccine that offered protection. The politicization of Covid treatment is the second worse outcome in 2021, to the politicization of the January 6 attempted coup.

Anti-vaxxers believe that their strong natural immune system will beat the virus, and that “healthy lifestyles” will give you a healthy immune system. They think using a vaccine to enhance the natural protection offered by their beautiful immune system is a bad idea because [insert the excuse of the day]. Perhaps they don’t realize that you can’t have natural immunity to a virus that your body has never encountered. An unvaccinated but fit person can get Covid because their body has no idea how to fight it.

There’s also the argument that Covid only kills older people. While the facts don’t support that idea either, maybe the anti-Vaxx community views it as an experiment to see if “having living parents or grandparents” is an evolutionary advantage for the kids who didn’t lose their relatives.

These issues show America must face the music. Wrongo’s sure we’ll face more 2021 music, but this is his top-of-mind thinking.

We’re going to have Christmas or seasonal music in each post this week. Today let’s listen to U2 – “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)” filmed in November 1987 at the Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. These guys were children back then. Maybe this tune has a special relevance in a world where Covid has taken so many lives:

Be kind. Not just during this season, but all the time.

Monday Wake Up Call – December 20, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Early snowstorm, Yosemite NP, CA – December 2021 photo by Don Smith Photography

Everyone’s speeding. Drive any highway in the US and cars are going really, really fast. It’s also true on local roads. For the past 20 years, speeding has been involved in approximately one-third of all motor vehicle fatalities.

In 2020, an estimated 38,680 people died in traffic crashes, the highest since 2007, according to the federal National Highway Safety Administration. That represented a 7% increase in nationwide fatalities at a time when Covid reduced driving activity by 13%. Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, wrote last week about how Americans became obsessed with driving fast, no matter the cost. He quotes a Connecticut state trooper:

“Covid was midnight on the day shift.”

We all experienced how empty the roads were at the height of Covid. Despite the empty roads, in the first six months of 2021, traffic fatalities in the US rose by 18%, the largest increase since the US Department of Transportation started counting, and double the rate of the previous year. And the National Traffic Safety Administration (NTSA) reports that drivers were hitting higher speeds on empty roads. They reported that as trips taken decreased by 50%, speeding increased by 45%. They also reported an approximate one-third increase in speeding above pre-pandemic levels from November 2020 through March 2021.

It’s a paradox: We have laws about driving speeds that no one obeys. We have police who enforce speeding laws without trying to catch everyone. More from Grabar: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Speeding is a national health problem and a big reason why this country is increasingly an outlier on traffic safety in the developed world. More than 1 in 4 fatal crashes in the US involve at least one speeding driver, making speeding a factor in nearly 10,000 deaths each year….Thousands of car crash victims are on foot….The odds of a pedestrian being killed in a collision rise from 10% at 23 mph to 75% at 50 mph.”

This isn’t going away. Americans love driving fast and apparently, have confidence in their own abilities. Grabar reports that about half of drivers admit to going more than 15 mph over the speed limit in the past month. But those same drivers regard other drivers’ speeding as a threat to their own safety.

Distracted driving, particularly involving mobile phones, is a huge problem as well. Cambridge Mobile Telematics reported data from more than 300 million trips, measured between January 2019 and July 2021. They showed that phone distraction jumped by more than 17% in the first month of the pandemic. On weekday evening commutes, it was higher by more than 31%.

Separately, Zendrive presented an analysis showing increases in cell phone use among drivers after the mid-March 2020 start of the public health emergency. Their analyses showed that in more than 16% of the crashes, a cell phone was manipulated less than five seconds before impact.

America has once again landed in the worst of both worlds: Drivers believe in their own skill, but not that of other drivers. We have thousands of speed-related deaths and a system of enforcement that isn’t designed to change behavior all that much.

Let’s leave the last words to Grabar:

“The nation’s most disobeyed law is dysfunctional from top to bottom. The speed limit is alternately too low on interstate highways, giving police discretion to make stops at will, and too high on local roads, creating carnage on neighborhood streets….the lack of political will to do something about it tracks with George Carlin’s famous observation that everybody going faster than you is a maniac and everybody going slower than you is an idiot. The consensus is: Enforce the speed limit. But not on me, please. Because while it would be nice to save 10,000 lives a year, it sure is fun to drive fast.”

Time to wake up America! Maybe you like driving fast while scrolling the internet on your phone, but it may make your life (or the life of a family member, or someone you’ve never met) end badly.

To help you wake up, listen to Queen do their song “Thank God It’s Christmas” originally released in November 1984. It was re-released last week by Brian May and Roger Taylor. They have it right, it’s been a long hard year:

Sample Lyrics:

Oh my love we’ve had our share of tears
Oh my friend we’ve had our hopes and fears
Oh my friends it’s been a long hard year
But now it’s Christmas
Yes it’s Christmas
Thank God it’s Christmas