Boy, they’re going full-bore with the Obama era nostalgia this year. For 2022 this is even extending to bringing back talking points for Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, really. For Thanksgiving 2013, the earliest example I have in my records, Reverend Al Sharpton posted these “turkey tips”. … Continue readingRevenge of the Thanksgiving Dinner Talking Points
Politico last night reported on a momentous development: a majority of United States Supreme Court Justices are prepared to join Samuel Alito in overturning Roe versus Wade, stripping women of the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy they have enjoyed for half a century. Liberals … Continue readingAfter Roe, Scorch the Earth
Making daylight saving time permanent, i.e. the “Sunshine Protection Act”? Blech. What we really need is to make standard time permanent; in the spirit of the rather propagandistic moniker springing forward for good goes by these days, I’ll call my solution of falling back for … Continue readingFor a Darkness Protection Act
Novak Djokovic’s case, and especially his recent reversal at the hands of a regime who obviously hate him personally and want to turn (what they no doubt consider to be) a filthy unvaccinated Serb untermensch into an example of their power for the undesirables to … Continue readingA Stream of Thoughts Against Lockdown
This morning I was thinking back to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic; back then, in the winter of 2020 and through March 2020, various right-wing personalities and influencers, particularly the “smart right”, the “mainstream conservatives”, and the like, were equivocating about lockdowns and restrictions … Continue readingFolkways From Our Past Return
“Extremism can come in many forms,” President Biden said at a speech recently. “It can come in the rage of a mob driven to assault the Capitol. It can come in a smile and a fleece vest.” “Extremist” or not, turns out coming in a … Continue readingTriumph of the Fleece Vest
We’ve all heard the mantra “Build Back Better” so beloved by our political leaders, including President Joe Biden, but what does it mean? At last we have an answer on the White House website, as encapsulated in “The Life of Linda”. Here I will go … Continue readingUpgrading the Life of Linda
Kurt Gödel is famous for his “incompleteness theorems”, and ranks among the all-time great mathematicians (he was also a logician and a philosopher). What’s less well known about him is that he claimed to have discovered an “inner contradiction” in the United States Constitution, a … Continue readingGödel’s Loophole: My Pet Theory
We should abolish elections and replace them with sortition, random selection from the citizenry, thus guaranteeing a representative body. I’ve posted about that before. But if we must have elections, what voting system should we use? Pure proportional representation, that’s what; specifically multi-winner ranked choice … Continue readingFor Proportional Representation
The results of the 2020 United States Presidential election are well known by this point, and much analysis has been offered, including by myself on Twitter. For the first time on this blog I would like to offer some of the thoughts I’ve expressed in … Continue readingChecking in on American Politics: 2020 Edition