2021 archive
“You Can’t Fire Me! I Quit! 0
Farron finds that Donald Trump’s letter resigning from SAG completely congruent with his personality. (Warning: Short commercial at the end.)
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Rescue the victim with politeness:
However, the gun fired, striking the driver in the leg.
The Stock Market Is Not the Economy, Crooked Wheel Dept. 0
Drew Magary took a flyer on the Robinhood app and ended up with very little john, which led him to form a theory about how the stock market works is worked. (Warning: Language.)
Individual stocks may go way up or way down, but the market itself only knows one trajectory. They’ll never let the whole market sink even if certain stocks eat curb. When the pandemic hit, what was the first thing legislators worried about? It wasn’t you. It wasn’t your favorite mom-and-pop pad Thai joint. It was the market. Who’d the legislators bail out in 2008 when the banks collapsed? Not you. The banks. Why? To keep the market up. They’ll never let it fail. All of their interests, regardless of party, coalesce within it. Hence, the average American’s best way to survive the vagaries of the market is to invest in ALL the corruption, not in bits and pieces of it.
That means index funds.
Recommended Listening 0
The Film Mystery, by Arthur B. Reeve.
In addition to being a decent mystery read quite competently, it was written in the age of the silents and is an interesting journey back in time. It will recall you to the film-making techniques of an earlier era.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
If you must maraud masklessly, be sure to maraud politely.
Instead, he showed up at the back of the restaurant with a gun. At first restaurant staff was confused as to what he wanted because the cash registers were in front.
And then things started to get weird. . . .
War on Christmas Redux 0
David looks at Republicans’ responses to criticisms of Marjorie Taylor Greene and suggests that “cancel culture” is the new “war on Christmas.” (Warning: Short commercial at the six minute mark.)
In Words of One Syllable . . . . (Updated) 0
Above the Law’s Kathryn Rubino reports on Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation law suit against Fox News and its dupes, symps, and fellow travelers.
The introduction to the filing is a doozy.
Addendum:
The lawsuits seem to bearing fruit.
Mayhap a working weapon against the purveyors of piffle has been found.
The Misinformation Superhighway 0
After drawing a distinction between misinformation and disinformation, Aditi Subramaniam offers some reasons as to why we are susceptible to misinformation (think the clickbait headlines that Snopes is so fond of debunking) and some techniques for dealing with it.
She starts by telling a story of her own trip down the rabbit hole of a clickbait headline (follow the link below to see what she discovered about said headline and its tenuous connection to facts, as well as for some hints to help avoid falling down your own rabbit holes). Here’s a bit of her article.
A Shining Tarnished City on a Hill
0
Michael Judge argues that Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the recent election was stolen from him have provided a playbook for autocrats abroad. A snippet:
A Quibble:
I find Judge’s condescension towards the name of Myanmar problematical.
Myanmar has been Myanmar (in its native language, Mranma Prañ) for almost a thousand years. The name, “Burma,” was a legacy of British colonialism discarded three decades ago.
Legacy of the Trumpling, a Notion of Immigrants Dept. 0
A naturalized American citizen born in Australia wonders whether he did the right thing in becoming an American citizen. Here’s how he introduces his article:
The Voter Fraud Fraudsters 0
As Farron mentioned, documented cases of voter fraud seem invariably to fall at the feet of Republicans.
Instigation 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, H. Colleen Sinclair examines the tactics that demagogues (and would-be demogogues) use to persuade their followers to hate and to follow the hate with hate-full actions, such as, say, just to pick an exammple, overrunning a national legislative hall. She idendifies three elements:
- Firing Up Emotions
- Constructing the Threat
- Disengaging (the) Moral Compass
Follow the link for an examination of each one.