2023 Archives

Mass shooters and child-killers are celebrating. Meanwhile Republican politicians vow to protect us and our kids from — wait for it — librarians and history teachers. Saturday night 10 people were murdered by a mass shooter in California. It’s the 37th mass shooting this year. We’re 23 days into 2023 and over 2,200+ Americans have already died of gun violence. We’re the only developed country in the world that unconditionally allows civilians to own military-style assault weapons, that allows “open carry,” that lets gun manufacturers openly buy politicians (thanks, SCOTUS).

The Best of the Rest of the News. — We have questions for the media about the debt ceiling — Speaking of questions, why wasn't Supreme Court Associate Justice Sam Alito asked under oath if he was responsible for the Dobbs decision leak? — Would the GOP survive a repeal of Citizens United? — As "macho man" Ron DeSantis says he wants to ban mask mandates by all Florida businesses, a new study shows one in ten people infected with Covid ends up with "long Covid". — And speaking of DeSantis, is his campaign against Black and queer people actually working? — Geeky Science! Strengthening your marriage might be as simple as putting pictures of you and your spouse around the house. — Video of the day: Anti-Abortion protestors get violent when someone with a bullhorn says the quiet part out loud

Will we continue to worship great wealth & allow the morbidly rich to manipulate our nation’s political processes to their own ends? Or will we wake up to the danger of this way of thinking? One of the stories out of the Davos Morbidly Rich Support Group meeting in Switzerland yesterday was Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema high-fiving each other, celebrating their success at killing voting rights legislation while preserving massive tax loopholes for banking and fossil fuel industry billionaires. But there was more “high” to that high-five than the media showed. They were literally high, both from the fortunes each has acquired and the billions they were surrounded by onstage. Science shows that acquiring wealth stimulates the pleasure/reward circuits in the brain’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex, just behind the eyes in the front-most part of the brain. Studies that map blood flow and electrical activity in the brain demonstrate that even anticipating money lights up this region, much like what happens when we’re presented with food or sex.

Why do other countries have extensive and functioning social safety nets and wealthy people who pay their taxes, and we have neither? We’re told by the Declaration of Independence that our nation was formed to provide every citizen with the basics of what government can and should provide: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” The “governed” in today’s America, however, aren’t getting the “happiness” they want or even, frankly, that they need