2024 Archives

Monopoly also produces extremes of inequality, and extreme inequality kills societies. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the Equality Trust in the UK have done extensive research on the topic, leading to two best-selling books and a brilliant website.51 They document in startling detail, going nation by nation and, in the United States, state by state, how inequality damages the lives of everybody except those who live in massive wealth bubbles at the top. It’s not the poverty that extreme inequality produces that does much of the damage. Instead, because we’re wired like all mammals to understand and perceive both fairness and unfairness, when we find ourselves in unfair situations, our interactions with the world and each other become distorted.

The H5N1 "bird flu" is ripping across America, decimating bird flocks and even infecting a few humans and other mammals. Should we be concerned? The H5N1 "bird flu" is ripping across America, decimating bird flocks and even infecting a few humans and other mammals. Should we be concerned? Particularly since Trump is polling so well after he totally botched our response to Covid? Keep in mind, Trump shut down the offices of pandemic preparedness in the White House and NSC in 2017, leaving America vulnerable to Covid; in this week's TIME magazine interview he says if he becomes president again he'll repeat that performance by shutting down the new Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR) that Congress authorized in 2022.

Trump has unleashed his inner psychopath and if he wins this election it's going to get uglier here in America than most people today can imagine… TIME magazine reporter Eric Cortellessa spent hours interviewing Donald Trump, producing a shocking cover story this week. Converting one of his opening paragraphs into bullet points for readability, he summarized that Trump fully plans: — "To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. — "He would let red states monitor women's pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. — "He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. — "He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn't carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America's founding. — "He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. — "He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn't paying enough for its own defense. — "He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen."

Why are Great Britain Conservative Members of Parliament welcomed into the Labour Party, but here in the US it's almost impossible for a Republican to successfully become a Democrat? Last week Dan Poulter, a Conservative Party member of Great Britain's Parliament, abandoned the Tories to become a member of the progressive Labour Party. In 2022, Christian Wakeford similarly left the Tories to join Labour, the equivalent of an American Republican member of Congress being welcomed into the Democratic Party. The last time a Republican member of the US Congress became a Democrat was New York's Michael Forbes, who made the switch more than two decades ago in 1999. Democrats in his district overwhelmingly rejected him in the 2000 election: although he raised and spent $1.4 million to hold his seat, he was defeated by a 71-year-old librarian who'd raised and spent a mere $40,000.