Category Archives: Popular Culture

The Virus

…has exposed Americans’ disconnect from reality.

[Update a while later]

Nancy Pelosi and the politics pandemic.

[Update a while later]

Goodbye, Green New Deal.

Set aside, for the moment, any reservations you might have about the coronavirus-emergency regime, and set aside your views on climate change, too, whatever they may be. Instead, ask yourself this: If Americans are this resistant to paying a large economic price to enable measures meant to prevent a public-health catastrophe in the here and now — one that threatens the lives of people they know and love — then how much less likely are they to bear not weeks or months but decades of disruption and economic dislocation and a permanently diminished standard of living in order to prevent possibly severe consequences to people in Bangladesh or Indonesia 80 or 100 years from now?

Not a prayer.

[Update later morning]

Yes, the president is not wrong: Pelosi is a sick puppy.

The Restaurant Business

I’ve never been a big patron of restaurants, both for reasons of cost and health (plus I hate being waited on and having to tip for it), but I’m glad that people who were are trying to help with gift cards.

[Update a few minutes later]

I should note, here or someplace, that so far this has barely affected my lifestyle at all. I rarely go out to eat, and am generally a hermit when I’m not traveling.