The Combo Platter

Politics—culture—economics—food—drink—religion—etc. The good stuff.

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Video & full transcript.

(via Bernie Sanders: The Vox conversation - Vox)

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(via Read Bernie Sanders’s populist, policy-heavy speech kicking off his campaign - Vox)

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(via The arguments that convinced a libertarian to support aggressive action on climate)

"the issues associated with climate change are not that different from the risk issues we deal with in the financial markets every day. We know there’s a risk — we don’t know how big the risk is, we’re not entirely sure about all of the parameters, but we know it’s there. And we know it’s a low-probability, high-impact risk. So what do we do about that in our financial markets? Well, if it’s a nondiversifiable risk, we know that people pay plenty of money to avoid it ... if this sort of risk were to arise in any other context in the private markets, people would pay real money to hedge against it ... Even if the climate-skeptics are absolutely correct about the modest impacts of climate change as the most likely outcome, it’s not the most likely outcome that counts here. Nobody would manage risk based on the most likely outcome in a world of great uncertainty."

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(via What Makes Us Happy, Revisited)

"the factor Vaillant returns to most insistently is the powerful correlation between the warmth of your relationships and your health and happiness in old age ... “The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points … to a straightforward five-word conclusion: ‘Happiness is love. Full stop.’ ”

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAWl5peI8HY) And now for something completely different.

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(via NASA: EM Drive shown to work in space-like vacuum)

"The EM drive is controversial in that it appears to violate conventional physics and the law of conservation of momentum; the engine, invented by British scientist Roger Sawyer, converts electric power to thrust without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves within a closed container. So, with no expulsion of propellant, there’s nothing to balance the change in the spacecraft’s momentum during acceleration. Hence the skepticism." Yet--so far--it seems to work.

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(via Bernie Sanders raises $1.5 million in 24 hours - CNNPolitics.com)

Key factoid: "The average donation was $43.54." A smidgen of it was mine.

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(via The anti-Obamacare movement is making red states sicker and poorer - Vox) "In effect, the Republican plan to destroy Obamacare has become a plan in which red states subsidize Obamacare in blue states ... If the subsidies are ripped out of federal exchanges, it will only cripple the law in red states that loathe the legislation. Obamacare will work fine in states that want it to work ... This is a key point that's often forgotten in the King v. Burwell discussion: the lawsuit shuts off subsidies, but it doesn't touch the taxes and spending cuts that pay for those subsidies. Republicans in those states will still be paying the taxes and bearing the spending cuts needed to fund Obamacare. They just won't be getting anything back."

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The sacrifices being demanded of Greece are barbaric. But it's either continue to bleed Greece, or admit the Austerity Emperor is naked. "Greece has made an incredible adjustment — close to 20 percent of potential GDP, or the U.S. equivalent of about $3 trillion per year (not our usual 10-year calculation) in spending cuts and tax hikes ... Greece has accepted roughly a 25 percent cut in nominal private-sector labor costs, or more than 30 percent relative to the euro average, far more than anyone else."

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Today is the 150th anniversary of the last battle of the Civil War, fought in and around my adopted hometown of Columbus, Georgia, one day after the assassination of Lincoln—and, ironically, on Easter Sunday.

When I think of the bitterness of today's politics, much of it rooted in religion, I wish for the magnanimity of Lincoln's second inaugural address, which he delivered five weeks before he was killed. The closing:

“Both [North and South] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Lincoln grew up in a Christian household, knew the Bible deeply, and as an adult attended Christian worship with his family. But he never joined a church, nor is there any record of him ever making a formal affirmation of Christian belief. This ambiguity seems to me to stem from Lincoln's fundamental humility. It seems a recognition that if there is a God, then God's nature and will are far beyond the ability of humans to know with certainty. But Lincoln could recognize suffering and grace, cruelty and decency, that were in front of his nose. Of those he could be certain. On those he could act, and on those he could require others to act.

The things that divide America today, grave as they are, are peanuts compared to the things that divided America 150 years ago. Our inability today to put aside our malice, to muster up some charity for those we consider our adversaries, to care for the battle-worn and widows and orphans, and to work for just and lasting peace, is a disgrace upon our generation. May God forgive us; may God grant the Lincolns among us a wider hearing; may God grant us more of Lincoln's humility; may God lead us to bind up our nation’s wounds.