Tag Archives: politics

———————————————————————–||———————–         The Past                                                                  Now             The Future What Will History Say by Ken Melvin When the new US History books come out in 2040, what will they have to say about 2020? What will they say about:  Globalization?  The Trump Presidency?  Global Warming?  The 2020 Pandemic?  China’s Rise?  America’s Decline?  Capitalism and Free markets?  Mitch McConnell? to run...

What Was Behind Barr’s Friday Night Massacre? . . . Ignorance A comment in my wanderings: Barr could not fire Berman who is a court appointed US Attorney. His foolish attempt to do so only makes him look even worse than what he was perceived to be. On Friday night, Barr claimed Berman had resigned. Sitting in the wings to replace Berman, a golfing buddy of Trump’s who is the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton would be the...

George Floyd and the Costs of Racial Capitalism, LAWCHA, Ken Estey, June 10, 2020 Some History A little bit about LAWCHA. The “Labor and Working Class History Association” is an organization of scholars, teachers, students, labor educators, and activists who seek to promote public and scholarly awareness of labor and working-class history through research, writing, and organizing. It grew out of the conversations among labor historians over the course of...

From The Guardian: In 2010, the UN declared clean water to be a human right. Yet a decade later, millions of Americans lack basic indoor plumbing, more than 100 million are exposed to toxic chemicals in their drinking water, and water bills have risen by an average of 80% across 12 US cities, in a cascading crisis of water affordability. The Guardian is tackling the subject of the US water crisis with a landmark series, in partnership with Consumer...

On Choosing a Belief System by Ken Melvin Belief Systems, these prisms through which we view the world, have been around from our earliest days. Not so long ago, the Ancient Greeks separated the concept of what we might call belief into two concepts: pistis and doxa with pistis referring to trust and confidence (notably akin the regard accorded science) and doxa referring to opinion and acceptance (more akin the regard accorded cultural norms). In quest...

The 2020 Presidential election as forecast by State polling As we all know, in the US Presidential election national polls are of limited use, as the election is actually decided on a State by State basis. I’ve seen lots of projections of the Electoral College vote based on national polls, but what if we go just by State polls, and in particular State polls that have been reported in the last 30 days? That, dear reader, is what the following map looks...

Springsteen: “I had another show prepared for broadcast this week on this strange and eventful summer, but with 100,000+ Americans dying over the last few months and the empty, shamed response from our leaders, I’ve been simply pissed off.  Those lives deserved better than just being inconvenient statistics for our President’s re-election efforts. It’s a national disgrace. If you haven’t noticed, President Trump—or anyone in the White House, really—hasn’t...

by David Zetland    (One handed economist) Interesting stuff “Biohacking life” — a physics geek gets into our metabolism Governments are printing money to “get out of the crisis”, but they are probably sowing the seeds of the next crisis (of inflation? fiscal collapse?) An incredibly interesting dive into Japanese cosmology The American Press Is Destroying Itself (under pressures of political correctness) This is the governance article (good/bad responses...

Writing for the Majority (5-4):  Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the explanation offered by the Trump administration for adding the question “appears to have been contrived.” Justice John Roberts did leave open the possibility of change if the Administration could provide an adequate answer. Executive branch officials must “offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public....

This article by Ezra Klein is excellent.  I can’t do it justice in a blog post, but here is a bit: This is the often neglected heart of nonviolence: It is a strategic confrontation with other human beings. It takes as self-evident that we must continue to live in fellowship with one another. As such, it puts changing each other’s hearts at the center of political action, and then asks what kind of action is likeliest to bring about that transformation....