Biden role is to reinforce the establishment

pick for ED scty better than DeVos but not left enough. Will Biden follow the advice of Dianne R. here interviewed on Democracy Now, namely, her adivce is to clear out Betsy Devos’s plants in dept of Ed?

democracy now

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/12/23/miguel_cardona_education_secretary

and look who Biden chose as his asst chief of staff who has been a long term Biden supporter but is head of the board of a Betsy Devos school privatizing group

https://tyt.com/stories/4vZLCHuQrYE4uKagy0oyMA/6Mr4AyZM0i0Z432cB0Gz3E

Biden is the Manchurian candidate for the establishment

long, interesting article on the science related to covid

As of this writing, the biomedical library PubMed lists more than 74,000 COVID-related scientific papers—more than twice as many as there are about polio, measles, cholera, dengue, or other diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries. Only 9,700 Ebola-related papers have been published since its discovery in 1976; last year, at least one journal received more COVID‑19 papers than that for consideration. By September, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine had received 30,000 submissions—16,000 more than in all of 2019. “All that difference is COVID‑19,” Eric Rubin, NEJM’s editor in chief, says. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told me, “The way this has resulted in a shift in scientific priorities has been unprecedented.”

Much like famous initiatives such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, epidemics focus the energies of large groups of scientists. In the U.S., the influenza pandemic of 1918, the threat of malaria in the tropical battlegrounds of World War II, and the rise of polio in the postwar years all triggered large pivots. Recent epidemics of Ebola and Zika each prompted a temporary burst of funding and publications. But “nothing in history was even close to the level of pivoting that’s happening right now,” Madhukar Pai of McGill University told me.

Throw in one of my philosophical pieces

First, Michael Serres, a French polymath who published over 60 books and never got a philosophy job in France and ended up for 30* years at Stanford in the French department.

Giving voices to the voiceless must be done to have an authentic politics. Seen with indigenous people, blacks, etc. Also giving voice to the nonhumans like water, worms, soil, etc. Serres published a book in 1990 on this.

“The Natural Contract” by Michael Serres

Global environmental change, argues Michel Serres, has forced us to reconsider our relationship to nature. In this translation of his influential 1990 book Le Contrat Naturel, Serres calls for a natural contract to be negotiated between Earth and its inhabitants.

World history is often referred to as the story of human conflict. Those struggles that are seen as our history must now include the uncontrolled violence that humanity perpetrates upon the earth, and the uncontrollable menace to human life posed by the earth in reaction to this violence. Just as a social contract once brought order to human relations, Serres believes that we must now sign a “natural contract” with the earth to bring balance and reciprocity to our relations with the planet that gives us life. Our survival depends on the extent to which humans join together and act globally, on an earth now conceived as an entity.

Tracing the ancient beginnings of modernity, Serres examines the origins and possibilities of a natural contract through an extended meditation on the contractual foundations of law and science. By invoking a nonhuman, physical world, Serres asserts, science frees us from the oppressive confines of a purely social existence, but threatens to become a totalitarian order in its own right. The new legislator of the natural contract must bring science and law into balance.

Serres ends his meditation by retelling the story of the natural contract as a series of parables. He sees humanity as a spacecraft that with the help of science and technology has cast off from familiar moorings. In place of the ties that modernity and analytic reason have severed, we find a network of relations both stranger and stronger than any we once knew, binding us to one another and to the world. The philosopher’s harrowing and joyous task, Serres tells us, is that of comprehending and experiencing the bonds of violence and love that unite us in our spacewalk to the spaceship Mother Earth.

“The Parasite” by Michael Serres

The second book describes us humans as parasites. Does that put us in our place?

I have not yet read any of his books. But a public intellectual in Australia, in a French dept, has read all his books and recently published a book on Serres. He also has a grant from the government to head up a project on The Social Contract. Here is a 20 min video on the topic and be sure to click CC to get closed captions. He makes the point that the independent human is ….

well, the link makes the poinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krCBqmyBV-E&list=PLHwZuhhD5UmBLXLG2Iex9ndtVnR5Cl2rz&index=13&t=385s

and the social contracts relies on TRUST which has been broken for sure by Trump, but by the political parties who have supported neoliberalism

Interesting and worthwhile 18 minute video.

Do the dems realize that they have to rebuild some of the common ground that is the unwritten rules that hold a society together?????

I put in the notes on Serres because he is mentioned in the video

If they don’t do this I’ll be singing more songs like this and I don’t want to sing songs like this 😑😣 https://t.co/iGVaikltyl

— Vickie Natale 🎤🎹 (@vickienatale) December 23, 2020

Lambert at Naked Capitalism weighs in on the AOC controversy. I didn’t follow the link to Yves Smith’s analysis of some of the issues with single payer

AOC is the most interesting politician today Lambert says and Dore is not a politician

UPDATE “The Left’s Most Naïve Cynics Have Turned on AOC” [Eric Levitz, New York Magazine]. The original headline, from the URL, is more fair: “jimmy-dore-aoc-medicare-for-all-strategy.” Levitz writes: “Last month, Dore argued that AOC and her progressive allies can best advance the cause of universal health care by denying Nancy Pelosi the support she needs to retain the Speakership — until she agrees to hold a House vote on Medicare for All. Dore considers this course of action so self-evidently optimal that the only possible explanation for why Ocasio-Cortez declined to pursue it is that the congresswoman is a fraud who cares more about her career than the needs of her constituents. ‘She is standing between you and health care,’ Dore told his viewers last week. Responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s argument that it takes years of organizing to lay the groundwork for seemingly spontaneous progressive breakthroughs, Dore exclaimed, ‘I figured this out in two weeks, AOC! You liar. You coward. You gaslighter.’ The comedian’s proposition (if not his condemnation of AOC) was taken up by a gaggle of other left-wing YouTube commentators, among them former MSNBC anchor Krystal Ball; host of Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski; and ex–Bernie Sanders campaign spokesperson Briahna Joy Gray. Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to respond to their call on Twitter further amplified its reach. Dore’s proposal was not entirely absurd.” •

Lambert here: I don’t really have a dog in this fight. AOC is an original, still the most interesting politician of the day. Dore is a comedian and media figure. If we’re looking for a leadership figure in the intersection of the set of all militants, the set of all those with strategic acumen, the set of all those committed to policy that centers the working class, and the set of all those with operational capability, neither Dore not AOC fall into that intersection. (Neither does Sanders. It also helps to be lucky, as Napoleon said of his generals. AOC is that.)

I also agree with Levitz that the Medicare for All movement is in need of a little self-reflection. Medicare, due to a neoliberal infestation, is not the panacea it is made out to be, as Yves shows here. Rather than consistently pointing to polling, advocates would do better to ask themselves why they haven’t closed the sale.

Finally, Dore has a YouTube audience of 653,000, big albeit not Limbaugh scale. If we apply the old adage from the blogosphere that of a readership, 1% comment, and of that 1%, another 1% go on to found their own blogs, Dore’s, er, militants would number 653000 * 0.01 * 0.01 = ~65. To be fair, that seems low. A good test of strength would be for Dore to organize Tea Party-style pro-#MedicareForAll activism at town halls in the upcoming Congressional recess. Let’s see what can be done on the ground.

Lambert’s next piece is the following. I added the bold which is his commentary while the first part is what came from the article

“The Black Caucus Unified with the Progressive Caucus? Watch Out, Baby”: Nina Turner, Progressive Disciple, Could Make Waves in Biden’s Congress” [Vanity Fair]. “When, within a week of suspending his presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden, the calculation was clear: progressives would get on board to take out Donald Trump, but they’d want something in return. Now, with Trump scheduled to vacate the White House in just over a month, the bill is coming due. As the so-called Squad swells with the additions of Congress members-elect Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, and Mondaire Jones, progressive lawmakers in the House are preparing to meet the Biden administration head-on. And in a somewhat ironic twist of fate, Biden—by tapping Congresswoman Marcia Fudge to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development—may have paved the way for one of his most formidable potential antagonists. After weeks of rumors, prominent progressive and top Sanders ally Nina Turner announced her campaign for Ohio’s 11th Congressional district, Fudge’s old seat, pending Fudge’s confirmation. And Turner—who once likened voting for Biden over Trump to eating half ‘a bowl of shit’ instead of the ‘whole thing’—has no patience for half measures as the COVID-19 crisis ravages the country, making societal inequities impossible to ignore. ‘The pandemic leaves no doubt that the system is rigged in this country…a system that does not benefit the poor, the working poor, and the barely-middle class,’ she told me in an interview on Wednesday.” • I like Turner. She’s militant, and militant is my favorite new word. But she was also in charge of the Sanders operation in South Carolina in 2020, and that did not go well. Militancy needs to be combined with operational capability even at the individual level. Does Turner have that?

Fascism's Blue Shirts get a participation award. https://t.co/EihzcHzlBL

— Steven Searls (@StevenDBT) December 23, 2020

So there! China enters an excluded domain and is playing hardball.

The US gave China less than a gram of moon rock samples way back in 1978. Chinese researchers produced over 40 technical articles from that sample including speculations on the origin of the moon. Richard Wolff has a video out about the stimulus check that begins with the story of a beggar getting a nickel from a rich man and throwing it on the ground taking it as an insult. The sample to China was an insult.

Now China comes back with 2 Kilos of moon rocks from an area far away from the American landing, in an area where it can be as hot as 110 degrees and bore deeply into the rock. US wants some of their rocks. Well, tough shit for now.

After China became the third country to land on the moon and bring back specimens, the fuss about the lunar rocks has come down to earth.

This comes after China’s Space Administration decided, to the disappointment of many space fans, to postpone indefinitely its nationwide exhibition of the moon samples brought by the Chang’e-5 lunar probe on December 17. Officials blamed “ground transport, logistical and security issues.”

Netizens wonder if these rocks, grains and dust, having made the perilous 20-day, 380,000-kilometer trip, are now stuck in Beijing’s notorious red tape and bureaucracy.

Chinese universities and research institutes are jostling for some small portions of the two kilos of soil samples to study. Now, it appears that an unlikely bidder may get hold of a decent amount ahead of academia: the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

China caught between a moon rock and a hard place
Beijing’s lunar rock diplomacy could break the West’s ‘tech Iron Curtain’ that excludes China from space program cooperation

The fake meat industry poses tremendous risks to global health as ultraprocessed foods have been robustly linked to obesity, ill health and early death. https://t.co/SUPizWRRVQ

— Dr. Joseph Mercola (@mercola) December 23, 2020