Author: Crowhill Report

Obama v Trump in 2024?

I think it’s a solid bet that neither Biden nor Harris would win a presidential election in 2024. (I’m not even certain Biden will still be in office in 2024.) So who should the Democrats start grooming for the next presidential race?

As I survey the current political landscape, I can’t think of anybody on the Democrat side who would beat Michelle Obama. She has no political experience, but neither did Trump, and Barak Obama didn’t have much experience either.

I don’t like her, but I’m in the minority. She’s very popular and admired, and many people would long for a return to the Obama days.

Unfortunately, there’s probably nobody on the Republican side who would beat Donald Trump.

Which reality is Justice Sotomayor living in?

Sonia SotomayorYou may have heard that Justice Sonia Sotomayor falsely claimed that 100,000 children are currently hospitalized, and in serious condition, with Covid. That number is wildly wrong.

Justice Stephen Breyer made a similarly inaccurate statement, claiming there were 750 million new cases of Covid in the country. (He may have simply confused thousands and millions. You know how it is in Washington. Thousands, millions, billions, trillions. They all run together.)

Will they be banned from social media for spreading Covid misinformation? (I hope Supreme Court justices have the sense not to be on social media.)

Where did they get these numbers, and why didn’t their B.S. detectors go off when they heard them? They should have the sense to realize those numbers are wildly inflated.

The bigger question is why these very smart, very well-educated people were not only misinformed, but confident enough in their incorrect facts to repeat them in the Supreme Court! Two minutes on a search engine could have solved this.

They would never have done the same with a legal precedent. They would have had their facts straight, and heads would roll among their staff if they had been misled.

But this? Facts don’t seem to matter when you’re making an argument about Covid.

I understand how this works with the normal population. People are too willing to believe things that confirm their biases, and everybody knows that we all live in different realities, with different fears and different facts. For some, armed insurrectionists killed police officers on Jan. 6. For others, Donald Trump really won the election and it was stolen from him.

But shouldn’t Supreme Court justices be smarter than this?

“Doomsday Book” by Connie Willis. 4 out of 5 stars

I’m not sure where I got this book. I just found it sitting on my shelf, and I wanted something to read. I probably picked it up from my mom’s house.

Wherever it came from, it was the perfect pandemic story for the holiday break. It’s set at Christmastime, and it’s about two plagues — one in 2040-ish Oxford, and one in 14th century Oxford.

They have invented a time-travel machine that allows historians to go back and investigate the past. A young woman intends to go back to 1320 — before the plague got to England — but things immediately fall apart. She doesn’t end up when she’s supposed to be, and as soon as she goes back, some virus starts infecting people in future Oxford, starting with the tech who manned the time-travel device.

The author has a very slow, verbose style, so it’s not a quick read. But it kept my attention, and I enjoyed it.

This 1992 look at the 2040s has some amusing quirks. They have video phones, but the phones are tied to specific locations. People have to wait around for a call. The author didn’t anticipate portable phones.

Willis doesn’t try to explain the time-travel technology, which is usually a good idea, although she also doesn’t try to wrestle with the paradoxes, as I do in My Seven Journeys Through Time.

All in all, a good read. Time travel, Medieval England, future England, riffs on Christmas themes, and a compelling story line that keeps you engaged to the last page.