Blog Archives

Why are we acting as if the pandemic is over?

7/28/2022

When my family took a road trip to visit relatives earlier this month, the last thing we thought about was Covid.
Inflation? Yes, it waited for us at every gas station and restaurant. The recent rash of airline cancellations? That was why we decided to drive, rather than fly. The drought? It was all around us in vivid shades of brown. The upcoming election? We were reminded of it every time we pulled into a gas station and saw a sticker on the pump, pointing at the price per gallon and announcing that “Biden did this.”
But Covid? Call it pandemic fatigue. We knew it was out there. We knew about the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants. But, so what? We are vaccinated. We’ve had our boosters.

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Nobel laureate Muhammed Yunus is in trouble

7/21/2022

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Muhammed Yunus, the 82-year-old financial wizard and friend of Utah, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for devising a microcredit program aimed at helping poor people help themselves out of poverty, is facing huge problems in Bangladesh, his home country.
The Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, is investigating him as an “enemy of the people,”
“He should be plunged into the Padma River twice,” local media quoted her as saying. “He should be just plunged in a bit and pulled out so he doesn’t die, and then pulled up onto the bridge. That perhaps will teach him a lesson.”
Those are ominous words from the head of a government numerous sources rank as rife with corruption. Transparency International earlier this year ranked Bangladesh 147th out of 180 nations in that regard. Gan Integrity has warned companies that “Corruption is pervasive at all levels of society” in Bangladesh.

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Pipe ocean to the Great Salt Lake? Be careful

7/18/2022

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''We think Utah will now be in control of its destiny.''
That’s what Utah Gov. Norm Bangerter said in 1987, as he turned on the first of three pumps designed to drain the Great Salt Lake and save the Wasatch Front from flooding.
I’m not being overly critical of the late governor, who I covered as a reporter and still respect immensely. He had little choice. The state had just paid $60 million for a west-desert pumping project. He had to put a good face on it.
But when you live next to a lake with no outlet in a hostile desert, the most foolish thing you can do is claim to be in control of your destiny. Even as he said those words, a lot of observers could already feel a change in the winds.
As the New York Times put it back then: “And now, just as the pumps are being turned on, the cycle of wet weather that caused the flooding is passing. Many wonder if the state is spending $60 million to solve a problem that nature would have repaired free of charge.”

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NASA photos: Does mankind matter in the universe?

7/14/2022

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Want to feel insignificant? Pick up a tiny grain of sand, hold it at arm’s length and try to focus on it against a radiant blue July sky.
That’s about the size of the bit of sky NASA’s new James Webb Space telescope examined this week. What it found, in brilliant images, were countless galaxies containing countless stars — images whose light has taken between thousands and billions of earth years to reach the telescope’s lens, which itself is 1 million miles from earth. A tiny speck of sky containing an unfathomable array of stars and planets — if nothing else, that ought to bring some perspective to life.

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Don't blame the Supreme Court; blame Congress

7/1/2022

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Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein once said the notion that Congress can’t delegate its lawmaking power to the vast executive branch bureaucracy had one good year — 1935.
That’s it. The other 233 years of constitutional government were not so good.
Perhaps until this week, that is.
1935 was when the Supreme Court thwarted the opening scenes of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal by overturning two parts of the National Industrial Recovery Act. The president wanted control over the practices of virtually every American business through “codes of fair competition.”

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Why are we acting as if the pandemic is over?

Nobel laureate Muhammed Yunus is in trouble

Pipe ocean to the Great Salt Lake? Be careful

NASA photos: Does mankind matter in the universe?

Don't blame the Supreme Court; blame Congress

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