The Angry Bear

From an old sixties coffee house person, just a little history. In 1950, Woodie Guthrie signed a two year lease to reside in a Fred Trump Brooklyn development. Having wandered around the countryside for a number of years, he knew the North did not have any special claim to racial enlightenment. One event of a shooting at a bus terminal in Freeport, Long Island stuck in his mind. “Ferguson Brothers Killing” by Woody Guthrie. “The town that we ride through...

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Exclusive: Trump to focus counter-extremism program solely on Islam … https://www.reuters.com/…/us-usa-trump-extremists-program-exclusiv-idUSKBN15G… Feb 1, 2017 – The Trump administration wants to revamp and rename a U.S. government … Republicans wrestle with effort to cut Obamacare … Although CVE funding has been appropriated by Congress and the grant recipients were … Life After Hate, which rehabilitates former neo-Nazis and other domestic extremists....

The word ‘narrative’ appears 41 times in the infamous Higgins memo, “POTUS and Political Warfare.” Guys, it’s time for some narrative critique. The narrative Higgins is most concerned about is something he calls “cultural Marxism,” which he defines in a paragraph at the top of page four of the memo: As used in this discussion, cultural Marxism relates to programs and activities that arise out of Gramsci Marxism, Fabian Socialism and most directly from...

I found a piece from two years ago on the notoriously far right, alt-right Public Broadcasting Service website entitled Column: Why the STEM gender gap is overblown by Denise Cummins, a research psychologist. She begins by noting that men don’t outnumber women in all areas of STEM, and she provides this graph: (Click to embiggen.) She then goes on: At the Ph.D. level, women have clearly achieved equity in the biosciences and social sciences, are nearly...

“The Changing of the Guard:” the prescient 1980 book that foretold neoliberalism About a month ago I read the synopsis of an interview in which Thomas Frank described the near evisceration of the Democratic Party.  Here’s his simple version: “[T]he Democrats have, what happened is that some years ago they decided they didn’t want to be the party of the people anymore. They didn’t want to be the sort of traditional Democratic Party that I grew up with, the...

Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic  Thoughts Jon Chait Shoots at all the Ducks in a Row — and Manages to Miss (once) I admire both Jon Chait and Glenn Greenwald. They do not admire each other. I enjoy it when they debate. Sometimes they both make fools of themselves. Jon Chait wrote a blog post “The Alt-Right and Glenn Greenwald Versus H.R. McMaster”. The chance to simultaneously critique the right and the left must have delighted him. The post is a critique...

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) “Rational” Optimism? I just finished this long, rather convoluted meditation on “rational optimism”.  Must we admit the world is getting better, getting better all the time? Really, there are two types of multidimensionality that need to be considered.  The first is that “better” is, if it’s anything, vector valued.  Many aspects of life go into its calculation, as well as the distribution of outcomes...

The Buchanan-MacLean Controversy The book, Democracy in Chains (with an even more lurid subtitle) by Nancy MacLean, a respected (until now) historian at Duke University makes a strong argument that the late James M. Buchanan of UVa, VaTech, and George Mason was the crucial link between the ancient states right racism of John C. Calhoun and the current Trump administration. From Calhoun, incredibly inaccurately labeled a “libertarian,” through the Agrarian...