What's New
Alice Rivlin Spoke About Inclusive Prosperity and the Need for Political Compromise; Vox Declared "Alice Rivlin shaped every major policy debate of the past 40 years"
In terms of what sort of policies are needed for inclusive prosperity, Rivlin was optimistic that the US economy remains strong and that enacting or strengthening a few “sensible centric economic policies” would help the country see continued growth while expanding the pool of those benefiting from the growth. The issue, said Rivlin, who was the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office, was whether these policies could ever be translated into law and action. more »
Jo Freeman's Review of The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparations Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia
Jo Freeman writes: Reparations for slavery has been in the air this year. It comes with lots of questions. In this book, Woodley answers them for one group who suffered directly from white supremacy. In 1959 the Prince Edward County school board closed its public schools rather than integrate them. Most white students were able to attend private academies for whites only. Black students had to leave the county or go without an education. Not until 1964 did the Supreme Court rule that the county had violated the students constitutional rights and ordered the public schools to reopen. Forty years later a Virginia professor calculated that these five years without public schools resulted in 2,202 black and 258 white youths receiving no formal education in their lifetimes. more »
Moms in Science From a Bay Area Newsletter: Organic Farming and Other Musings on Traditional Breedings, GMOs and the Vaccine-Preventable Diseases
We subscribe to a newsletter called Science Smooze. Here is part of their current message as well as the video: Watch any show about science now and you will see many women in key positions. Imagine how many more are in the trenches doing the work of scientists. "When I see weird behavior [from male colleagues], my first inclination is not to think, 'What's wrong with me. It's, 'What the heck is wrong with these guys?'" - Lene Vestergaard Hau (physicist, known for her work with cold atoms and light)
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Here’s Why This Year’s Measles Outbreaks Are So Bad: “Ninety out of one hundred non-vaccinated people exposed to an infected person will develop the disease”
“We’re facing a perfect storm of a highly contagious infection introduced into pockets of unvaccinated children,” says Melissa Stockwell, an associate professor of population and family health at Columbia Mailman and of pediatrics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. While most cases of the measles are mild, one in twenty infected children in the US is hospitalized with pneumonia, and some infections can cause deafness. In 2017, the illness killed 110,000 people worldwide, nearly all young children in low-income countries. more »
