The Erickson Report, Page 1: Noted in Passing

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Noted in Passing

We start the time with a feature called Noted in Passing, where we take a brief look at some news items that may not get a lot of attention here but were too important to lest pass without noting.

And we start that with something I can't say is significant in any way because it reveals nothing that was not long since clear, but it was a lovely little moment and worth noting.

Speaking with reporters on October 4, Tweetie-pie was asked, obviously, about the infamous phone call with President Zelensky of Ukraine. His High Orangeness insisted that his concern had nothing to do with Joe Gaffe-machine Biden, it was all about corruption.

Then a reporter asked “Have you asked foreign leaders for any corruption investigations that don’t involve your political opponent?”

Tweetie-pie was stumped. He just looked to the sky and blathered something about being against corruption.

I have an enjoyable image of that reporter getting some deserved high-fives once the cameras were off.

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People my age may remember the song In the Year 2525 by Zager and Evans. It predicts a rather dystopian future and in the last verse says "now it has been 10,000 years" and "now man's reign is through."

Well, on October 8, a controversial dam project was closed and the Tigris River began to rise and will continue to until its waters swallow Hasankeyf, a small city of about 3300 in southeastern Turkey.

Hasankeyf

So why do I bring up the song in this connection? Because in it, 10,000 years was presented as if it were an incredibly long time - while the city of Hasankeyf has been inhabited by various peoples for 12,000 years, perhaps longer. It is one of the oldest known human settlements, an historic crossroads of empires and cultures and one of the cradles of human civilization - and now it is about to be destroyed.

Ultimately, about 15,000 people in the region will be forced to move and 300 archaeological sites and settlements will be beneath the surface of the new reservoir.

There were attempts to protect the site by naming it a World Heritage Site, but they failed. The ancient city meets nine of the 10 required criteria, but the tenth is that the Turkish government must apply for a conservation listing - and since they are the very ones who want to be able to flood it, you know how far that got.

The dam project has proceeded despite fears it will spark water wars with countries such as Iraq that sit downstream of the new dam and depend on the Tigris, the flow of which now will be affected by decisions Turkey makes about maintaining its reservoir.

For my part, I can't help but wonder if Turkey's determination to go ahead with the project has anything to do with the fact that the population of the area is predominantly Kurdish.

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It has been said that national cultural trends have a habit of starting in California. Two recent items make me hope that is true.

First, on October 2, California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law the state’s public banking act, which allows city and county officials to sponsor public banks. Public, that is, as opposed to private, non-profit as opposed to profit, opening the prospect of low-interest loans for public projects. The LA City Council already has said they’re going to propose creating one.

There have been efforts to establish public banks in nearly two dozen other states. This year alone, four state legislatures beside California - New York, New Mexico, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts - have introduced bills to create or explore creating public banks. None, however, have passed. The only state- or municipally-owned bank now in existence is the Bank of North Dakota, which has been in operation since 1919.

Getting back to California, nine days later, Governor Newsom signed a bill that says that as of Jan. 1, 2020, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation won't be able to enter into or renew a contract with a private, for-profit prison to incarcerate people. The goal is to eliminate private, for-profit prisons in the state, including those used for immigration detention, by 2028.

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It's well-established that the IRS audits the working poor at about the same rate as the wealthiest 1% even though it's obvious that the latter is where the money is. In April, Sen. Ron Wyden asked IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig for a plan to fix the imbalance. Rettig agreed.

Well, the "plan" came out in September and turns out the IRS isn't going to do anything about it until Congress agrees to restore the funding it slashed from the agency over the past nine years - something which GOPpers in the Senate have no intention of doing.

The IRS said it uses relatively low-level employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers, audits are done by mail and don’t take too much staff time. Those people claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit, the EITC, alone account for 39% of all of the IRS audits last year.

On the other hand, the IRS whines, auditing the rich is hard. It takes senior auditors hours upon hours to complete an exam.

In other words, it's just easier and cheaper to audit the poor - especially considering that, in something this "plan" didn't address, the rich have the resources to fight back while the poor have to just pay up and shut up.

Ginger Baker

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We have an RIP this time out.

On October 6, Ginger Baker, pioneer of double-bass drumming and drum solos in rock, died at the age of 80. The cause was complications from chronic-obstructive pulmonary disease.

For most of his life, Baker was a combative, mostly-unpleasant, often-nasty SOB - but his music helped to define rock music for a generation and establish the drums as an essential part of that music and I still can fantasize playing the drum solo on the Wheels of Fire version of Toad.

So thanks for the music: RIP, Ginger Baker.

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Montgomery, Alabama, is 60% non-white. Despite that, in its 200-year history it has never had a black mayor. That is, it didn't until October 8, when Steven Reed received 67% of the vote in a run-off election.

Reed had gotten a plurality of the vote in the general election, but fell short of a majority, necessitating the run-off, which he won handily.

There's a special significance to achieving this in Montgomery. Before the Civil War, Montgomery was a center of the domestic slave trade. It was the birthplace and first capital of the Confederacy. It was the site of George Wallace’s “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” speech. It was a hub of violent resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, the site of a brutal attack on the Freedom Riders.

It's also where Rosa Parks made her stand and the year-long bus boycott that followed was an early major victory of the civil rights movement, and the place where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as a national leader.

Steven Reed

It's a sad thing that we still have to celebrate such firsts, that there are still so many firsts to achieve. Nonetheless, every such first is a victory, a step, a stair, and so should be celebrated.

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I've included this here largely because of the twist it involves. Breast cancer in men is pretty rare; it makes up only about 1% of the total number of cases.

At the same time, the rate of breast cancer in men has increased by 50% since 1975 while the rate of breast cancer in women, while obviously much higher, has been declining for the past twenty years.

A study just published in JAMA Oncology reveals that in this case men have worse outcomes than women, have lower survival rates for breast cancer. And one of the reasons, it appears, is a difference in treatment: Women were far more likely to receive standard-of-care endocrine therapy for appropriate tumors. There’s one twist: Women getting the better care. Here's the other twist: Clinical trials for breast cancer treatments usually don't include any men.

It has become a scandal how women were often not included in clinical trials under the assumption that "women are just small men." The result was that, to cite one notorious example, heart disease and even heart attacks in women were often grossly misdiagnosed because the symptoms can be significantly different in women and all the research was done on men.

Here we have the twist, the opposite, where it was men excluded from the research, leading to men not receiving the best treatment. A good reminder of the fact that sexism and assumptions about gender hurt everyone.

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Finally for now, according to a new study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, headquartered at California State University at Santa Barbara, hate crimes rose 9 percent in major U.S. cities in 2018, the fifth consecutive yearly increase.

The most common victims for hate crime reported to police in major cities in 2018 were African Americans, Jews, and LGBTQ people.

While extremist homicides decreased markedly in 2018, those committed by white nationalists and the far right rose by a third and were the most common, which, although the report did not say this, I'm prepared to connect to the fact that Jews were the direct target of half of the bias/extremist killings in 2018, in what was the worst year ever for anti-Semitic killings in the United States.

It's worthy of particular note that while there are politically motivated assaults attributed to Antifa and so-called "hard left extremists," they committed no homicides in 2018 or so far in 2019.