Child snatching anxiety
For someone who grew up in North Dakota and Iowa before the Des Moines kidnappings, current laws and practices are nuts. I don’t see how children can grow up, never out of site of a grown-up.
Monthly Archives: September 2017
When a great power destroys itself
The war launched on September 11, 2001, was designed to inaugurate a new American century. It certainly did that, but not in the way America’s leaders expected.
Salute Colin Kaepernick and his friends
Let everyone in the stands show kneeling players a sign of support during the national anthem. Salute them. It takes courage. You won’t be a son of a bitch.
Interest group politics in a partisan environment
We can compare Tea Party and Black Lives Matter as single-issue interest groups. We can also consider what happened to these groups after they decided to align with multi-issue interest groups, or major political parties.
Harvard’s Kennedy School honors Chelsea Manning, rescinds honor when CIA officials object
The Kennedy School knew its decision to recognize Chelsea Manning as a visiting fellow would be controversial. When objections came, straight from the CIA no less, the Kennedy School embarrassingly chose to align itself with the agency that mistreated prisoners as a matter of policy.
Repeal and replace ACA with single-payer: we have waited a long time for this day
It was all bullshit. They knew it, too, or should have. The reason Jonathan Gruber said we were all too stupid to understand ACA is that no one can understand bullshit, not even MIT professors.
Equifax theft
Equifax suffers a hit to its reputation, and must endure a few news cycles where people write articles like this one. Come Christmas, they’ll be back to business as usual, except they will try to have more safeguards in place. They will hope the next group of criminals is not so clever. Believe me, the hope is vain.
Why shall I kill you? Let me count the excuses.
Police have a lot of ways to kill you, a lot of excuses for doing it. Michael Bennett was correct to wonder if he would see his family again. How did Bennett disguise himself as a criminal? We can only guess. You will never hear an apology, or an explanation from the officers who mistreated him.
Pennsylvania state police disguised a mobile surveillance vehicle as a Google car
If we want to counter this unhappy impulse to know everything about everyone, we ought to mock authorities’ incompetence, ridicule their foolishness, and make fun of their badly conceived deceits before they feel assertive enough to end free-spirited criticism.
The Jeffersonian 