Mitch Wagner

Biden went into this campaign with his chief credential being that he was a nonentity who would do nothing. With Biden as President, Americans could go back to ignoring politics.

Instead, Biden is turning into a fire-breathing radical – and I love it.

He appears to be building an FDR-style transformative Presidency, which is what the US and the world need right now.

The fate of civilization and billions of lives literally depend on it.

Although now that I think of it, to call Biden a “radical” is wrong. When the house is on fire, it’s not radical to shout, “The house is on fire!”

Biden’s $2 trillion climate plan.

Country-themed sitcoms ruled the TV airwaves for a decade, but in the early 1970s, CBS axed them. The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction were just three of the shows that bought the farm.

The Rural Purge: Death of the Country Broadcasting System, on Mobituaries by My Rocca.

I had not planned to spend quite so much time this morning updating my Mac but here we are.

When did we stop having “problems” and starting having “issues”? Because I have a problem with that.

That’s sorted.

Moon vs. Sun utilization question answered The Monroeville Breeze, Indiana, September 20, 1934. pic.twitter.com/tU4FGC1rqX

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) July 23, 2020

James Hamblin MD, writing at The Atlantic:

Have several masks, made to fit well around your nose and mouth. Make them as heavily layered as you can tolerate. After wearing them for a day or so, or in a high-contact scenario, let them sit for a few days in a sunny, out-of-the-way place. Between the effects of time and light, there should be little need for running a washing machine or going through the hassle of hand-washing your masks….

If it sounds like I’m making this up based on best guesses, I am. Everyone is. We would ideally all be wearing surgical masks, and disposing of them frequently, but we didn’t prepare accordingly. So for all their flaws, cloth masks are important: Making them effective enough for use in daily pandemic life means we’re freeing up medical-grade masks for people who really need them, especially in places where they are still in short supply, such as the United States. Health-care workers around the world still need proper personal protective equipment more than a random guy named Gene who wants to go to the store to buy snacks.

Good news for me. I haven’t washed my masks in … well … ever.

Bray walked away from $1 million because he couldn’t stand Amazon’s labor and business practices anymore. Now he’s an outspoken advocate for breaking the company up.

Karen Weise writing at The New York Times:

SEATTLE — Tim Bray, an internet pioneer and a former vice president at Amazon, sent shock waves through the tech giant in early May when he resigned for what he called “a vein of toxicity” running through its culture.

Within a few hours, his blog post about the resignation drew hundreds of thousands of views, and his inbox filled up with requests from journalists, recruiters and techies. Soon, lawmakers on Capitol Hill cited the post. It all made Mr. Bray, 65, Amazon’s highest-profile defector.

But there was more he wanted to say.

In the weeks since, he has aimed his brain power not at fixing a coding problem but at framing a broader critique of the company. In talks and blog posts that have drawn attention inside the company, he has called for unionization and antitrust regulation. Amid “the beating of the antitrust drums,” Mr. Bray wrote in one post, he would like to see Amazon separate its retail business from its lucrative cloud computing unit.

“And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone,” he said.

Mexican cave relics suggest humans were populating the Americas up to 17,000 years earlier than thought