The High Cost of Phone Calls in Prisons Generates $1.4 Billion a Year, Disproportionately Driving Women and People of Color Into Debt (businessinsider.com) It has been a while since I have tackled issues with the prison system in the US. Besides it being heavily skewed towards the color of a prisoner and the funding they possess to mount a defense; once convicted and imprisoned, the screwing over the prisoner increases. If they go to trial, the...
Read More »Disinformation and the Manipulable
Politicians, preachers, and other charlatans have long known people were manipulable. They had achieved their mastery of the craft of manipulation by observation and practice. By craft, they were con artists. In another sense, they were psychologists before there was such. Before 1860, psychology was a branch of philosophy. A German, Wilhelm Wundt, was one of the first to proclaim psychology a science in its own right and the first to proclaim...
Read More »The Case of The Creeping Crud
In her 2020 book ‘Waste’, Catherine Flowers speaks to the practice in Alabama – throughout the South – of keeping the poor and ignorant poor and ignorant so that there would always be a cheap source of labor on hand. In a September 2021 House Budget Committee hearing, a member from neighboring Georgia patiently explained the economic necessity of cheap labor; how increased wages were a threat to small businesses; and how any increase in wages would...
Read More »stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided.”
I am no attorney. However my experience has caused me to learn the law an how it applies to us. I have learned attorneys are not necessarily honest with plebeians, You know us butchers, bakers, candle stick makers or collectively anyone at all. As a just-out-of-boot-camo Marine private, I can remember one Corporal saying this to us at Pendleton. Different story for another time. Yesterday (September 25, 2021, Robert Reich had an interesting...
Read More »Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act Improves the ACA for All Incomes
President Biden’s temporary ARPA Improves ACA Subsidies through 2022. xpostfactoid: Will 60-64 year-olds have a choice between Medicare and Obamacare? What will that look like?, ARP puts more ‘affordable’ in the Affordable Care Act | healthinsurance.org and How the American Rescue Plan Act will boost marketplace premium subsidies | healthinsurance.org If you have not been reading any of what is going on with the ACA and Medicare; it is time...
Read More »Subpoenas Issued, Focusing on Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection
As a subscriber to Professor Heather Cox – Richardson’s “Letters From An American,” I have access to each daily article. And as a follow up to yesterday’s “Letters From An American,” today’s, September 23, 2021 submission gives additional detail to the amount of effort made to subvert the January 6th certification of the election by Congress. As detailed in this edition, there were four distinct players or Trump staff who laid much of the...
Read More »Online Voting
Online Voting Yes, a wonderful innovation!!! No, I had not heard of this before, although maybe somebody reading this had encountered it. So, where is this fabulous innovation being adopted? Why Mother Russia! So polls showed the United Russia Party that supports Vladimir Putin getting only 30% support for the Duma election that just happened. But while I have not seen specific numbers, it is my understanding that they have been reelected as...
Read More »So, Whatever Happened To The Arizona Fraudit?
So, Whatever Happened To The Arizona Fraudit? Even though these “audits” are now apparently spreading to other states, notably Pennsylvania and maybe Wisconsin, efforts to somehow find election fraud in the presidential elections in those states in 2020, there is an odd thing that has happened that has basically dropped off the media radar screen. That is what the outcome of the initial one of these is, the “fraudit” in Arizona, authorized and...
Read More »Norway’s Climate Dilemma
Norway’s Climate Dilemma Carlos Joly, a finance-and-climate consultant, has a piece today on the upcoming election in Norway, one of the world’s major exporters of oil and gas. To its credit, Norway puts its earnings in a fund to support future generations after its deposits are exhausted, known to economists as the Hartwick Rule. That’s great for economic sustainability in Norway, but what about the threat its fossil fuel industry poses to the...
Read More »Coronavirus dashboard for September 10: was Labor Day indeed the peak of the Delta wave?
Coronavirus dashboard for September 10: was Labor Day indeed the peak of the Delta wave? I have been saying for some time that the Delta wave would probably peak around Labor Day. It’s not certain yet, but it is looking increasingly likely to have been the case. The Delta wave struck in both the US and Israel at almost the same time, with almost the same vaccination profiles. Here’s what cases per capita (bold lines) and deaths per capita...
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