Biden’s Gun Plan; Challenging the Economic Consensus; Data in Dating

Political Misfits

Dr. Iyabo Obasanjo, professor of public health at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA, talks to us about vaccine passports, the Biden administration’s hesitation for issuing them at the federal level and allowing some states to use them, and what potential problems could arise with these passports. We also talk about the new B.117 strain of the COVID virus, which is becoming dominant in the U.S., whether current vaccines will be effective against it, and whether a different vaccine distribution program would be a better option to combat this pandemic and future ones.
Representative Ruth Buffalo, member of the North Dakota House of Representatives and first Native American Democratic woman elected to the North Dakota Legislative Assembly, tells us about what’s happening in state houses around the country, where Republicans have won big, and how we are seeing unsettling legislation being proposed and passed, like anti-trans bills and voting restrictions, and the options available to push back against these.
Robert Hockett, both the Edward Cornell Professor of Law and a professor of public policy at Cornell University in New York, senior counsel at Westwood Capital, and a fellow of The Century Foundation, joins us in a conversation about the IMF and World Bank Spring meetings, how investment is too focused on individual investors and how collective action would be a better option by focusing on investments that benefit the general population, such as infrastructure, through national development strategies formulated by new councils and institutions.
Chris Garaffa, web developer, technologist and editor of TechForThePeople.org, joins hosts Michelle Witte and Bob Schlehuber on our Trends with Benefits segment to talk about what it means to have dating apps scouring public records for our criminal histories, and why that might not be a solution to the problem of sexual violence. They also get into how machine learning could help detect and understand unconscious bias, and the limits of personal bias investigations when it comes to structural discrimination.
The Misfits also talk about Biden’s new gun plan and Mike Pence’s new book deal.