The Rittenhouse Verdict and the Future of Vigilante Violence There are typically two levels in a case like Rittenhouse’s, the individual issues of justice and accountability, and the social implications of the crime and its judicial resolution. I want to spend a moment with the second. America faces an impending crisis of vigilante suppression of […]
Repeated Lying About Lying Of course, Donald Trump has been using this Big Lie method of simply endlessly repeating a Big Lie and successfully so with his claim that last year’s presidential election was “rigged” or “stolen,” according to the latest poll I just saw on the order of 70% of Republicans accepting this Big […]
Dems Continue To Sink Despite Improving Economy On the first page of today’s Washington Post was reported a poll showing that when a random sample was asked, 46% said they would vote for a generic Republican candidate for Congress versus 43% for a generic Democratic candidate. Given reported further pro-GOP gerrymandering, if this were to […]
I actually subscribe to a substack (even though I have a rule to never ever pay for web content). I have made 2 exceptions Talking Points Memo and Noahpinion. That written, one of the ways in which I find Noah Smith extremely stimulating is that I often, almost always, disagree with some of the many […]
We are almost two years into this pandemic, and a K-8 school in Boston is being forced to close for 10 days due to lack of testing capacity. First, capacity was inadequate to quell an outbreak: Curley’s school testing program became overwhelmed when more than 500 students a day needed testing. That meant some infected […]
Seldom do we get the chance to build something the way it should be. For the internet, the first chance was back in the 1990s. Not enough was known then. We’ve learned a lot the hard way since. Let us begin our design by asking, “How best to utilize the internet?” It is apparent that […]
Where we are in the Conversation VBP: I had stopped the dialogue on Kip Sullivan’s paper Medicare’s “Value-Based Payment (VBP)” programs are Failing on page 3 of 12 pages so as to detail it as much as possible and breaking this portion out for readers. It can be reviewed here. This part of Kip’s paper […]
‘Brutus,’ the anti-Federalist to presciently foresaw the Imperial Supreme Court As you may recall, for the past several years I have done a great deal of historical reading about Republics; how they were structured, what were their strengths and weaknesses, whether they were able to last a long time, and whether they were consistent […]
Infrastructure week: organs of the human brain, created by the human hand Who owns general social knowledge? Who owns the general intellect? Alf Hornborg pointed out that without the fuel to run it, a tractor is simply a piece of sculpture. It is not even a sculpture, though, if there is no one to design it […]
Farmer and Economist Michael Smith In this AgDaily piece, they do a great job of outlining the history of agriculture and sort of where it is headed, pretty much the same as it always has been, with a few caveats. Over time it has gotten much harder and now even more so with equipment prices […]