Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Friday, April 3, 2026
Saturday, March 28, 2026
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Brandolini's Law
Brandolini's Law explains why it is so difficult to refute lies and distortions. Here's a Wikipedia article on this subject:
Brandolini's law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) is an Internet adage coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The adage states:
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.[1][2]
The challenge of refuting bullshit does not come just from its time-consuming nature, but also from the challenge of defying and confronting one's community.[3]
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Thursday, March 19, 2026
While The Looting Was Happening
Thom Hartmann wrote this today (3/19/26) and it's very accurate! Blaming someone other than the wealthy who are taking your money! >>
"While the looting was happening, the oligarchs had a problem. People were getting angry. So they built a machine to point that anger somewhere else. Welfare queens. Immigrants. Crime. Culture wars. Voter fraud. Pick your decade and they had a fresh villain ready to go, always someone at the bottom of the ladder, always someone with even less power than the working people being robbed. It’s the oldest trick in the book, going back to the Caesars and the Confederacy. And for forty-plus years it worked like a charm. Working people were so busy being furious at each other that they never looked up to see who was actually picking their pockets."
https://hartmannreport.com/p/no-i-wasnt-kidnapped
Restarting This Blog (March 2026)
I'm restarting this blog after a long absence. In reading through the earliest posts (covering the election of 'Cadet Bone Spurs' and continuing on for about two years) it's uncanny how accurate some of the writings I had quoted were and still are. Sad but true!
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Registration is a voter-suppression tool. Let’s finally end it.
This from Ellen Kurz writing in the Washington Post:
Voting rights have a long and sordid history in our country. There have always been people who try to maintain political and economic power by keeping others from voting — landowners over renters, men over women and whites over black. As a result, a fraction of Americans has been more powerful in deciding who our lawmakers are and what laws govern us.
Thursday, October 11, 2018
Democracy Now / Amy Goodman Interview with Jason Stanley
This interview is creepy -- because it's so accurate. Jason's book is called "How Fascism Works." Very important reading. . .America is heading in this direction.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the 10 pillars of fascism. What are they?
JASON STANLEY: The 10 pillars of fascism are, number one, a mythic past, a great mythic past which the leader harkens back.
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Ralph Nader on Kavanaugh
Ralph Nader has it right regarding Kavanaugh -- visit this link to read his excellent article on the subject:
The cold-blooded, most corporate-indentured Republicans dominate our political process today. Mitch McConnell (see Kentucky Values), led by the election-buying Koch brothers, drove Kavanaugh's nomination through the Senate, excluding important witnesses who wished to testify. To shore up claims of legitimacy, McConnell allowed the FBI to conduct a sham investigation that was shaped by Trump's White House lawyer Don McGahn and the FBI head, Christopher Wray. Wray had previously worked with his friend Kavanaugh on the Starr investigation of Bill Clinton's sexual misconduct.
Resilience and action are required. The Supreme Court is deeply political – forget about the claims of judicial independence by the five Justices in the majority. Their votes on issues of class, race, presidential and corporate power, peoples' rights, and remedies and access to justice (day in court with trial by jury) against corporations are quite predictable.
Saturday, June 23, 2018
A Wonderful Article -- I Hope It's True!
Great article from Charles Pierce writing in Esquire -- I like what he says and I hope it's true.
From the site:
From the site:
The country’s head is clearing. The country’s vision is coming back into focus and it can see for the first time the length and breadth of the damage it has done to itself. The country is hearing the voices that the cacophony of fear and anger had drowned out for almost three years. The spell, such as it was, and in most places, may be wearing off at last. The hallucinatory effect of a reality-show presidency* is dispersing like a foul, smoky mist over a muddy battlefield.https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21775485/migrant-child-crisis-trump-presidency/
Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Jeffrey Toobin on the Supreme Court Husted Decision
Good article from Jeffrey Toobin re the Husted (Ohio voter law) decision. He points out that the Republicans know very well that the Ohio system (contacting voters via post card and removing them from the roles if they don't respond) disproportionately affects lower income voters.
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Great Book by Ian Millhiser
I have been greatly enjoying this book by Ian Millhiser. He takes you through the whole history of the Supreme Court and shows us how the justices have generally stood in the way (with exceptions of course) of racial equality. The exceptions are the Reconstruction period and our modern era since the 1950s. There was virtually no activity addressing racial justice in between these two time periods.
Sunday, May 20, 2018
Analysis: If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math to prove it
From Paul Solman at PBS NewsHour:
No one who's studied business as long as I have — more than 40 years now — should be shocked by the headline above. In fact, I've believed for years that luck is a better determinant of success than smarts (or effort). It's why I adopted a motto soon after my journalism career kicked off that tried to capture the perception: "There is no big-time." That is, it's remarkable how many at the top are, well, unremarkable. So I figured luck had to play a lead role in their ascension. I've never had occasion to change my mind.
Solman's Sense and Sensibility
But of course, this was a subjective judgment. Now, however, comes support for the cynicism: a study that claims the predominance of luck over talent in the distribution of wealth has been mathematically confirmed. Two Italian physicists — Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Rapisarda — and one economist — A. E. Biondo —make the case, and they've got a computer model to back it up.
Sunday, May 13, 2018
We read every one of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by Russians. Here's what we found
This is from USA Today:
While some ads focused on topics as banal as business promotion or Pokémon, the company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community.
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