The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion… — The GOP's dirty little secret exposed, courtesy of Donald Trump: Republicans in the Senate could have ended the shutdown anytime they wanted. — Epstein, Rubio, or ego? What's really behind Trump's Venezuela madness? — Trump's new refugee policy: white, wealthy, and welcome. — Hispanics not welcome either, unless they worked for one of Trump's shabby golf motels. — "Judge Boxwine" Pirro, recently recruited from Fox "News" for a federal judgeship, apparently demanded prosecutors delete the word "mob" to describe a member of the mob that attacked the US Capitol on January 6th. — Tear gassing trick-or-treaters: Noem's new definition of American values. — From firebrand to outcast: Marjorie Taylor Greene's midlife MAGA crisis. What's happening with MTG? — Hunter in a Farmer's World: Rethinking ADHD: It's Not Forgetfulness, It's a Different Kind of Seeing — Wisdom School: The Silent Conversation Between You and Your Bones

Algorithms are not tuned for what is best for society. They don't follow the rules that hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution have built into our cultures, religions & political systems… Some data points for your consideration: — On Saturday in Chicago's affluent Old Irving Park neighborhood, Trump's secret, masked police violently pulled a 67 year old U.S. citizen — a member of a local running club returning to his home from a run — out of his car and threw him to the street, where they assaulted him with such force that they broke six ribs and left him with internal bleeding. — Donald Trump is openly taking bribes, publicly ordering political prosecutions, murdering people in naked violation of both US and international law, all while claiming the Supreme Court gave him absolute immunity from prosecution for any crime. — An MIT study finds that lies presented as news travel six times faster across social media than truths. — While over 75% of Americans trusted the news fifty years ago, today that number is a mere 28%, with only 8% of Republicans believing what they see or read in mainstream outlets. These are all the same story, and they all largely derive from a single source, a mind poison that was introduced into the American (and world) mindstream in a big way about two decades ago.

Dark money, captured courts, and media empires are quietly doing what dictators once could only dream of... Trump and the billionaires and foreign fascists he's aligned with are both stronger than most think and weaker. Today I'll deal with the stronger part; tomorrow, the weaker. We're living in a moment when the line between democracy and dictatorship is far less clear than we like to believe. As a recent analysis by Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, puts it, we've already moved onto the midpoint along the spectrum between democracy and dictatorship where "competitive authoritarianism" lives. That's the world of regimes that hold elections but use their control over the nation's systems to skew the rules, restrict opposition, weaponize institutions, vandalize the truth, and destroy/ignore democratic norms. We're more than halfway down that road in just ten short months.

The American among the Three Musketeers of neoliberalism was Milton Friedman, who taught for years at the Chicago School of Economics and has become a figure of cult worship on the economic and political right in America. He was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater’s 1960 campaign for president, and a formal advisor to, among others, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Donald Rumsfeld (who he pushed Reagan to take on as his VP instead of GHW Bush in 1980). Friedman was the functional theologian among the three; he absolutely believed that there was a near-mystical power to unregulated markets and that virtually any sort of governmental intervention in or regulation of the marketplace produced economic distortions that prevented capitalism from working its magic.