The Crowhill Journal

You 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?

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.

Venmo, PayPal and Cash App will now have to report transactions totaling more than $600 to the IRS as Biden plans to ramp up financial enforcement

… you might want to listen to Pigweed and Crowhill’s predictions for 2022.

A couple predictions didn’t make it into the show: Russia will invade Ukraine and China will invade Taiwan.

While I don’t agree with everything in this article, it raises an interesting question: We Are In a New Civil War … About What Exactly?

I think people have a gut-level feeling that the country is divided, but it’s not always clear where the lines are drawn. Here are some suggestions.

• The woke vs. people with brains
• The elites vs. the common man
• Tradition vs. change (Or, perhaps, rapid change vs. slow change)
• A Republic vs. a Democracy
• Central control vs. local control
• Family authority vs. government authority
• Objective vs. subjective (e.g., sex vs. sexual identity)
• Critical Race Theory vs. people with brains
• America is racist vs. America is the greatest nation on earth
• Collective vs. the individual (guilt, rights, etc.)

It’s tempting to list “facts vs. rhetoric / conspiracies,” but it would be hard to pin that on one side or the other. Both sides seem equally guilty.

Feel free to add your this vs. that ideas in the comments.