Category: Sociology
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The dangers of the shorted short sell
I know something is a story when my wife gloms onto it. So, it was pretty extraordinary when she focused on the financial crisis involving short sellers of GameStop stock. I’m doubtful she even understands what shorting a stock means. I’ve watched a half dozen videos on this and I still find it confusing. What…
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Running down the QAnon rabbit holes
It sucks to be a QAnon believer right now. Their god, Donald J. Trump, let them down. No message went out the day before Inauguration over the Emergency Broadcast System that their Lord and Savior was going to rescue the country from the peril of democracy and that the army was imposing martial law. Somehow,…
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K-ing our way to a recovery
My Thanksgiving was spent with family. Only in this case, family means my wife and me, plus two cats who got a few scraps of turkey with their supper. It was a scaled down meal absent some of the extra fatty dishes my wife makes during the holidays, like her cheese souffle. Also missing was…
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God won’t save you from COVID-19, but science might
Everyone’s feeling out of kilter these days. Most of us are feeling somewhat scared too. It’s reasonable to expect that in the weeks ahead we will feel more scared, as the COVID-19 crisis gets much, much worse. When people we know, particularly family and celebrities, are felled by the disease we’re going to be looking…
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Christianity Today
From the perspective of this non-Christian, Christianity today is a mess. The magazine Christianity Today hinted as much with its December 19th editorial calling for Donald Trump to be removed from office. Needless to say, it didn’t go over well with Donald Trump, or the evangelical wing of Christianity which it supposedly represents. Trump quickly…
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The free market is failing us
Are you feeling freer yet? From all the free market stuff happening, I mean. What I’ve been noticing – and what you are probably noticing too – are all the vacant storefronts. Retailing must be in recession. We have a tiny mall across the river from us. I was in there the other day looking…
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Lessons from Book of Mormon (the musical)
We visited New York City last week, our first trip there since probably 2003. You rarely go there and not see a Broadway show. We saw two: Come from Away, a heartwarming musical about how a community of 9000 in Newfoundland, Canada took care of 7000 people after 9/11 when their flights were diverted there…
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Trump and Stone are poster boys for toxic masculinity
Looks like Roger Stone is going to be off to prison for a long time. He was convicted yesterday of seven counts of tampering with witnesses and lying to Congress. Arguably, it was Roger Stone who took the Republican Party off the deep end. For twenty nine years, Stone courted Trump, trying to get him…
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Religion is failing us, Part Two
(Read Part One, if you haven’t.) For a couple of decades now, I’ve been interested in the phenomenon of Near Death Experiences (NDEs). I’m not obsessive about it, but my interest in it picks up from time to time. Yesterday, it was snagged again watching this video on YouTube: The speaker at this TED Talk,…
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Is pornography bad?
I’ve written about pornography sporadically over the years, including this 12-year-old post on why I liked the idea of the .xxx domain, an idea that finally came to fruition in 2011. You don’t find too many people who will admit to watching pornography, at least regularly. Chances are though that if you are on a…
Occam's Razor 