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Author Archives: Chris
Weekly Digest – March 27, 2016
Must Read
- Robert Reich, How the Peoples Party Prevailed in 2020 [See Note 1 below]
- Charlie Pierce, There Is a War on Voting in the World’s Greatest Democracy (Ours) [Related reading]
- Lance Selfa, The Same Bosses
- Mike the Mad Biologist, We Are A Chickensh-t Nation [Related reading]
Should Read
- Cathy O’Neil, Flint Water Advisory Task Force Report
- Fernanda Santos (NYT), Angry Arizona Voters Demand: Why Such Long Lines at Polling Sites?
- Charles Marohn, Understanding Growth, Part 5
- Domenico Montanaro, A Timeline Of Hillary Clinton’s Evolution On Trade
- Sen. John McCain (NYT), Salute to a Communist
- Philip Jenkins, Recognize the Islamic State [See Note 2 below]
- Alan Jacobs, Naming the Dead
Weekly Digest – March 20, 2016
Must Read
- Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman, The Lobbyist Who Made You Pay More at the Drugstore
- Mark Buchanan, Economists Are Blind to the Limits of Growth
- Gaius Publius, The Goal of the Neo-Liberal Consensus Is to Manage the Decline
- Anthony Brooks, [Bernie] Sanders Got His Start In Burlington, And His Policies Continue To Shape The City
Should Read
- Matt Taibbi, Why Trump’s Endorsements Should Scare Your Pants Off
- David Neiwert, Violence Begets Violence — Just the Way They Like It
- Hunter Blair, Introducing the People’s Budget
- Mark Buchanan, Humanity’s Race Against Itself
- Mark Buchanan, Steaming slowly toward the limits of growth [Ed.: A rebuttal to this column.]
- Tom Murphy, Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist [Ed.: Link fixed 3/23]
- Nelson Schwartz (NYT), Carrier Workers See Costs, Not Benefits, of Global Trade
- Joseph Stiglitz, The New Generation Gap
- Cathy O’Neil, Resist the evil of the selfie password
Thought for the 2016 Presidential Election and American Politics in General
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force. Too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others…
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others…
But we can perhaps remember—even if only for a time—that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek—as we do—nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something…and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
And so it begins
[Merrick] Garland is, by any objective measure, a nominee of Supreme Court caliber who could make a historically influential justice…. [He] is perhaps the least political nomination Barack Obama could have made. In a sane world, that would make Garland’s confirmation more likely. In the world we live in, it probably makes it less likely.
Music for Wednesday night
Music for Monday night
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
The way you build a truly vicious nationalist movement is to wed a relatively small core of belligerent idiots to a much larger group of opportunists and spineless fellow travelers whose primary function is to turn a blind eye to things. We may not have that many outright Nazis in America, but we have plenty of cowards and bootlickers, and once those fleshy dominoes start tumbling into the Trump camp, the game is up.
UPDATE 5/23/2016: And, sure enough, the fleshy dominoes start to fall.
Weekly Digest – March 13, 2016
Must Read
- Elise Gould, Wage inequality continued its 35-year rise in 2015
- Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Quit Your Job [Ed.: Much more nuanced than the title implies.]
- Dave Roberts, Got Denmark envy? Wait until you hear about its energy policies.
- Andrew Gelman, The problems with p-values are not just with p-values: My comments on the recent [American Statistical Association] statement
Should Read
- Jeffrey Goldberg, The Obama Doctrine
- Ben Shapiro, Trump’s Horrifying Anti-Military Slur At Last Night’s Debate Should Scare You
- David Cay Johnston, The real Trump tax scandal [Ed.: No, I have not forgotten The Trump Litany.]
- Jane Roper, The Winter That Wasn’t
- Corey Robin, Educate, Agitate, Organize