Category: Politics 2021
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Religion likely killed Jerry
Jerry (not his real name) is dead. Jerry, age about seventy, died recently of covid-19. Jerry could have been vaccinated but chose not to be. Jerry is also the first person I know personally to die needlessly of covid-19. With 800,000 deaths you would think I would know some others, and perhaps I do. I…
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Up your game with an N95 mask
So I’ve taken to wearing an N95 mask. I don’t use it all the time, obviously, but I do when I’m out (or rather indoors) with the rabble. I wore it yesterday in the pet food store and also at the Costco. At the latter, I surreally saw quite a number of unmasked patrons. I’m…
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Inadequate to the stormy present
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” Abraham Lincoln This quote has been…
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Stay calm and stop doing stupid stuff
Was my last post too alarming? I actually hope it was. But I’m hardly alone thinking the end is nigh for democracy in our country. Thanks to gerrymandering, the number of competitive House districts is now nearly nonexistent. An institute that monitors the health of democracies listed the United States as a backsliding democracy. It’s…
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Tomorrow’s unfortunate news today
I can see the future! Obviously I’ve made lots of predictions over the years and many of them turned out wrong. And while I can’t say exactly when and how things will happen in the future, I can see the future of the United States easily enough over the next decade or so. Most likely,…
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It’s time for Democrats to encourage Republicans to be anti-vaxxers
I’ve reluctantly concluded that it’s in our national interest to encourage Republicans not to get vaccinated. Really, those of us who care about a true representative democracy and civil rights for all should be giving gobs of money to Facebook and right wing sites to make sure they keep reinforcing anti-vax messages. It’s cruel, it’s…
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Dogmatism is our enemy
Dogma in the broad sense is any belief held with unquestionable certainty. Wikipedia America is being strangled by dogmatism. Happy yet? We’re awash with dogmatism and thanks largely to social media and more specifically Facebook, most of us are living in a dogmatic virtual reality. So dogmatism was driven in part by the dogma of…
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The Fed can’t save the rest of us
It’s tempting to say there are four branches of government. In addition to the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, there is effectively a fourth branch of government: the Federal Reserve. Often called the Federal Reserve Bank, it’s not a bank at all. You can’t deposit money into it, withdraw money from it or take out…
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Save the republic?
It all feels so inevitable because this is a play we’ve been watching unfold for decades. Republicans have known that long that demographics are against them. For conservatives, it’s largely always been that way because they stacked the deck so that if they lose, it won’t be very often. Assembling this country we call the…
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There are plenty of anti-vaxxers on the left
It’s tempting to put all the blame for the pandemic on Republicans. At least when it comes to anti-vaxxers, blame can be allocated on many Democrats as well. This is because there are plenty of “all natural” Democrats out there. While I hate to generalize, you will find a lot of them shopping at Whole…
Occam's Razor 