MONEY IS NOT WEALTH
by A. Richard Miller
Begun September 29, 2008; last updated April 7, 2026.

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Why I started this compilation:

On the eve of USA's November 2008 national election, an urgent proposal for an unsecured $700-Billion, maybe $800-Billion loan to mismanaged banks and stockbrokers was generating understandable controversy. In its initial form the Bush Buddies Bailout was one more Weapon of Mass Deception, a public-welfare program (later, a two-step program) for wealthy people who game the system. But the problem remains.
What, exactly, went - and continues to go - wrong? What ARE reasonable goals, what are NOT, and how might a more populist government reach good ones? Jill and I searched, asked friends, and found part of the discussion in the mainline U.S. Press - which is dominated by large corporations, and is quickly becoming a large corporation that reports with bias. We find the parts they don't want us to find - in The New York Times and The Washington Post, overseas, and in the Alternative Press. Some favorite resources are: Alternet, Campaign for America's Future, Common Dreams, Daily KOS, Demand Progress, Democracy Now, Umair Haque's Eudaimonia & Co., Freedom From Religion Foundation, The Guardian, The Hill, The Huffington Post, The Humanist, Henry Ford's Innovation Nation, Little Sis, The Marginalian (was Brain Pickings), Mother Jones, The Nation, Nation of Change, National Public Radio (NPR, Goats and Soda), Dan Rather's News&Guts, Phys.org, Politico, ProPublica, Quanta Magazine, The Raw Story, SciTechDaily, Second-Rate Democracy, TruthOut, Russ Baker's WhoWhatWhy.org, and Wired. We keep a sense of perspective, to know which news is biased, and how.
The more we read, the more we realize that - as much as we want our money back - that is only one of many ways our country is becoming impoverished. Often by corporations, which most definitely are NOT people! (For one thing, too many rapacious corporations have no shame.)

The Fragile States Index (Fund For Peace)

U.S. National Debt Clock, by Ed Hall

The Freecycle Network
[Good. A grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns and neighborhoods. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills.]

Global Weirding Is Here.
- Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, February 17, 2010)

Buy Nothing Project
[Bad? See its Person-to-Person section - on Facebook - and then see Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life, below.]

Calculated Risk (blog)

The Conscience Of A Liberal (NY Times blog by Paul Krugman)

To Build A Better Ballot; an interactive guide to alternative voting systems, by Nicky Case, 2016)

OurFuture.org (Campaign For America's Future)

Lifton's Thought Reform, (ca. 1997; Changing Minds)
Milieu control, mystical manipulation, confession, self-sanctification through purity, aura of sacred science, loaded language, doctrine over person, dispensed existence.

Secret Worlds: The Universe Within (Molecular Expressions, 1998)
View the Milky Way at 10-million light-years from the Earth. Then move through Space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude, until you reach a tall oak tree. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

The Market As God, by Harvey Cox (The Atlantic, 1999)
Living in the new dispensation.

The Bible As God - Or, Owning A Canadian, Amongst Other Fallacies (The Internet, 2018?)
Which part of Leviticus do YOU choose not to believe?

The 14 Characteristics Of Fascism, by Lawrence Britt (Free Inquiry magazine, 2003)

The Legacy of F.D.R. (Time, major series from 2009)
Franklin D. Roosevelt led the U.S. through a depression and a world war. By the time he died, the nation was profoundly changed - and we owe much of the change to him and his bold presidency.

God On Grass (Permaculture Research Institute, October 8, 2010)
[We have met the enemy, and he is us! --Pogo]

Global Surveillance Disclosures (Wikipedia, 2013–present)
Ongoing news reports in the international media have revealed operational details about the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and its international partners' global surveillance of both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens. The reports mostly emanate from a cache of top-secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The Strange Disappearance Of Cooperation In America, by Peter Turchin (Cliodynamica, 2013)

La Griffe Du Lion (2010?)
A mathematical evaluation of racial/sexual/economic biases.

NEW: Eudaimonics: The Art Of Realizing Genuinely Good Lives, by Umair Haque (Eudaimonia, September 14, 2017)
How are we, I wondered, to make a giant leap from an economic paradigm of human organization to a eudaimonic one? From one that single-mindedly, one-dimensionally maximizes near-term income, at the price of the well-being, health, flourishing, of you, me, our grandkids, and our planet, to one that elevates and expands all that - from one that, as it grows more and more broken, minimizes life realizing itself, instead of maximizing life realizing itself?

Corporate Surveillance In Everyday Life (Institute for Critical Digital Culture, 2018)
Every click on a website and every swipe on a smartphone may trigger a wide variety of hidden data-sharing mechanisms distributed across several companies and, as a result, directly affect a person's available choices. Digital tracking and profiling, in combination with personalization, are not only used to monitor, but also to influence peoples' behavior. ...
Facebook uses at least 52,000 personal attributes to sort and categorize its 1.9-billion users by, for example, their political views, ethnicity, and income. In order to do so, the platform analyzes their posts, likes, shares, friends, photos, movements, and many other kinds of behaviors.
In addition, Facebook acquires data on its users from other companies. In 2013, the platform began its partnership with the four data brokers Acxiom, Epsilon, Datalogix and BlueKai, the latter two of which were subsequently acquired by the IT-giant Oracle. These companies help Facebook track and profile its users even better than it already does, by providing it with data collected from beyond its platform.

Help Us Cure Online Publishing of Its Addiction to Personal Data, by Doc Searls (Linux Journal, March 14, 2018)
(and The Big Datastillery that targets YOU)

It's Official: Watching FOX Makes You Stupider. (The Nation, 2012)

Ten True Facts Guaranteed To Short-Circuit Republican Brains (Daily Kos, 2012)

ALEC Exposed (Center for Media and Democracy, 2011)

His Grief, and Ours: Paul Ryan's Nasty Ideal Of Self-Reliance (New Republic, 2012)

We All Built This Great Nation Together: Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, and the Myth of Radical Individualism (Nick Gier)

The Foul Reign Of Emerson's "Self-Reliance" (New York Times, 2011)

A Declaration of Conscience, June 1, 1950 speech by U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith (U.S. Senate, 1950)
(The beginning of the end for Senator Joe McCarthy but, unfortunately, not for McCarthyism.)

The Death Of God, by Friedrich Nietzsche (1885)

Losing My Religion For Equality (Jimmy Carter, 2009)
"The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world. This is in clear violation, not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions - all of whom have called for proper and equitable treatment of all the children of God."

Invented Symbols, by James Carroll (Boston Globe, January 3, 2006)
"Homo Sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority," Joyce Carol Oates once remarked, ''then forgets that symbols are inventions." This lesson applies across the human condition, although it shows up regularly in the realm of religion, where symbolism is the native language.
Now the church is acknowledging that the passion and authority once invested in limbo, however ''unofficially," can yield. Limbo is an invented symbol that can be left behind.
So is the nation-state. It is not religion that draws the most fervent investment of passion and authority in our time, but rather the politically-autonomous entity for which humans have learned to kill and die. That the invented character of the nation-state is forgotten is revealed whenever God is invoked as its source and justification. ''For God and country" is an idolatrous slogan, and a dangerous one. It is scrawled on walls across the world.
The new invention was the United Nations. Far more than an organization, it, too, was a symbol in which passion and authority could be invested. Not only weaponry, but new modes of transport and communication, and then a revolution in information technology all forced a redefinition of the human condition, and the symbolic power of a cooperative world entity came ever more into its own. Not ''God and country" anymore, but Earth itself as holy.
But, in one of history's great ironies, the main inventors of the United Nations, the Americans, found it impossible to stop treating their own nationhood as an absolute value. There were, perhaps, reasons for this during the Cold War, but since then the United States, more than any other nation-state, has reiterated its narrow autonomy, repudiating treaties, promulgating unilateralism, making aggressive war, and treating the global environment as a private waste dump. The United States, in sum, has invested its national sovereignty with passion and authority proper to God, not to an invention of human beings.
The United Nations, where the United States is represented by a man who holds it in contempt, is now a symbol of the planet's new jeopardy. Just as the church is letting go of one limbo, America is condemning the world's best hope to another.

RELIGION: What It Was For; What Went Wrong; How To Fix It, by Benjamin Becula, pen name of ?? (??)

"RELIGION Is The Opium Of The People", by Karl Marx, the father of "Scientific Socialism" (1843)
Religious suffering is, at the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The New Populism (Campaign for America's Future, 2014)

Grokking Republicans: The Non-Cooperator's Dilemma (Daily Kos, 2014)
To create More and Better Democrats means to increase cooperation. Punishing cooperation is the declared Republican mission.The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod, proposes a theory that says they lose, and recommends particular political strategies to make it happen faster.

Freethinkers And Libertarianism, by David Niose

EXXON: The Road Not Taken (Inside Climate News, 2015)
"This multi-part series describes how Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research decades ago and then, without revealing all that it had learned, worked at the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed.

The History Of Volcanic Eruptions Since Roman Times (Past Global Changes magazine, 2015)

What's Really Warming The World? (Bloomberg, 2015)

Vanishing: The Sixth Mass Extinction (CNN, 2016)
We're entering the Earth's sixth era of extinction - and it's the first time humans are to blame. CNN introduces you to the key species, and people who are trying to prevent them from vanishing.

Yale Climate-Opinion Maps, U.S. 2016

Envisioning The Hack That Could Take Down New York City (NY Magazine, June 19, 2016)
How it's been done. How it might all be done together.

The Legend Of Hercules Mulligan (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, June 30, 2016)
We're all familiar with the legendary heroes who fought to secure our independence from the British: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere and his midnight ride. But there are many other influencers of the Revolutionary War whose names don't immediately come to mind when reflecting on the birth of this great nation. Their efforts and contributions are no less significant or important to securing the freedoms we enjoy every day. The heroics of their lives and stories remain unsung, like many of those serving their country in the shadows today.
This Fourth of July, to celebrate the anniversary of our independence, we are shining the spotlight on one such hero, a man who risked his life to save General George Washington. Twice. A man who helped convert Alexander Hamilton from a Tory to a Patriot. A man who successfully ran his own New York City business and used that business to live among the British, befriending them and covertly acquiring information while overtly tarnishing his reputation with the Patriots. That's right, Hercules Mulligan.ber 28, 2021

History Of Boston's Water System (slide presentation; Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, October 6, 2016)

Earthquakes Of The First 15 Years Of The 21st Century (4-min. video; NOAA, December 2, 2016)

Why Excessive Consumption Limits Your Creativity (Medium, May 2016)

Is The World Ready For A Guaranteed Basic Income? (Freakonomics, 2016)

Scientists Are Pro-Testing. (Science, 2017)

The Gerasimov Doctrine (Politico, 2017)
It's Russia's new chaos theory of political warfare. And it's probably being used on you.

We All Want Healthcare To Cost Much Less  -  But We Are Asking The Wrong Question?, by Joe Flowers (Medium, 2017)
Imagine this: Healthcare  -  the whole system  -  for half as much. Better, more effective. No rationing. Everybody in.

Kim Hill: Sustainability Is Destroying The Earth: The Green Economy Vs. The Planet (Deep Green Resistance News Service, May 25, 2017)
What is it we are trying to sustain? A living planet, or industrial civilization? Because we can't have both.

Thirteen Things The Public Sector Does Better Than The "Free" Market (Daily Kos, October 1, 2017)

What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest An Answer. (New York Times, November 7, 2017)

MichaelMoore.com

Our Revolution

Angry White House Staffer

GOP Rape Advisory Chart

The Loneliness Of Donald Trump; On The Corrosive Privilege Of The Most Mocked Man In The World, by Rebecca Solnit

NEW: Marie Brenner: After The Gold Rush (Vanity Fair, September 1990)
Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler's collected speeches, "My New Order" (1941), which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Hitler's speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.

NEW: Timothy Snyder: Hitler's American Dream (Slate, March 08, 2017)
The dictator modeled his racial campaign after another conquest of land and people - America's Manifest Destiny.
[This magazine article was adapted from the same author's book, "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning" (2017). "Timothy Snyder is one of the world's leading historians, and a prominent public intellectual in the United States and Europe. An expert on eastern Europe and on the Second World War, he has written acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history, as well as political manifestos and analyses about the rise of tyranny in the contemporary world."]

Vote Sleuth: Investigating Democracy (Los Angeles Times, 2017)

The Way Donald Trump Is Handling His Job As President (Gallup Poll Daily Data)

PutinTrump.org

Donald Trump (Vice)

Obamacare 101: Here's What You Need To Know, (Los Angeles Times, 2017)

Duty To Warn (Duty To Warn, 2017)
Duty To Warn is an association of mental-health professionals and other concerned citizens who advocate Trump's removal under the 25th Amendment on the grounds that he is psychologically unfit.

The Way Donald Trump Is Handling His Job As President (Gallup Poll Daily Data)

"Who Am I? Why Am I Here?" (#25thAmendmentNow)
A running thread of Trump not knowing where he is, how he got there, or the appropriate response to give in the moment. Some mental-health professionals are concerned that he may be exhibiting signs of Alzheimer's, but he might just be an idiot.

The Hamilton 68 Dashboard tracks Russian influence operations on Twitter. (Hosted by the Alliance for Securing Democracy.)

How Facebook's Destructive Ethos Imperils Democracy (The Guardian, March 17, 2018)

Atlas Of Utopias (Transformative Cities, 2018)

Congressional Scorecard; Congressional Civil Liberties Record in the Trump Era ACLU, 2018)

Chart: The Percentage Of Women And Men In Each Profession (Boston Globe)

Smoking Bans In Private Vehicles (Wikipedia)

Light Cycles, by Quinn Norton

States Of Anarchy (New Republic, 2010)
America's long, sordid affair with nullification.

"The Suffocation Of Democracy", by Christopher R. Browning (New York Review Of Books, October 13, 2018)
If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments.
Trump's personal flaws and his tactic of appealing to a narrow base while energizing Democrats and alienating independents may lead to precisely that rare wave election needed to provide a congressional check on the administration as well as the capture of enough state governorships and legislatures to begin reversing current trends in gerrymandering and voter suppression. The elections of 2018 and 2020 will be vital in testing how far the electoral system has deteriorated.
Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights. On these issues, often described as the guardrails of democracy against authoritarian encroachment, the Trump administration either has won or seems poised to win significant gains for illiberalism. Upon his appointment as chancellor, Hitler immediately created a new Ministry of People's Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who remained one of his closest political advisers. In Trump's presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. The highly-critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump's ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.

She Votes. (NPR's special SERIES on women and the vote, October 20, 2018)

Murder And Extremism In The United States In 2017 (ADL Center on Extremism, February 27, 2018)
Over the past 10 years (2008-17), domestic extremists have been responsible for at least 387 murders; of these, 274 (71%) were committed by right-wing extremists of one type or another.

Quantifying Hate: A Year Of Anti-Semitism On Twitter (ADL Report, May 7, 2018)

Why Read Aristotle Today? (Aeon, May 29, 2018)
Modern self-help draws heavily on Stoic philosophy. But Aristotle was better at understanding real human happiness.

The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready? (Atlantic, July 1, 2018)
The epidemics of the early 21st century revealed a world unprepared, even as the risks continue to multiply. Much worse is coming.
On average, in one corner of the world or another, a new infectious disease has emerged every year for the past 30 years: mers, Nipah, Hendra, and many more. Researchers estimate that birds and mammals harbor anywhere from 631,000 to 827,000 unknown viruses that could potentially leap into humans. Valiant efforts are under way to identify them all, and scan for them in places like poultry farms and bushmeat markets, where animals and people are most likely to encounter each other. Still, we likely won't ever be able to predict which will spill over next; even long-known viruses like Zika, which was discovered in 1947, can suddenly develop into unforeseen epidemics.
One hundred years ago, in 1918, a strain of H1N1 flu swept the world. It might have originated in Haskell County, Kansas, or in France or China - but soon it was everywhere. In two years, it killed as many as 100 million people - 5% of the world's population, and far more than the number who died in World War I. It killed not just the very young, old, and sick, but also the strong and fit, bringing them down through their own violent immune responses. It killed so quickly that hospitals ran out of beds, cities ran out of coffins, and coroners could not meet the demand for death certificates. It lowered Americans' life expectancy by more than a decade. "The flu re-sculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death", Laura Spinney wrote in Pale Rider, her 2017 book about the pandemic. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in history - a potent reminder of the threat posed by disease.
Despite advances in antibiotics and vaccines, and the successful eradication of smallpox, Homo sapiens is still locked in the same epic battle with viruses and other pathogens that we've been fighting since the beginning of our history. When cities first arose, diseases laid them low, a process repeated over and over for millennia. When Europeans colonized the Americas, smallpox followed. When soldiers fought in the first global war, influenza hitched a ride, and found new opportunities in the unprecedented scale of the conflict. Down through the centuries, diseases have always excelled at exploiting flux.
Humanity is now in the midst of its fastest-ever period of change. There were almost 2-billion people alive in 1918; there are now 7.6-billion, and they have migrated rapidly into cities, which since 2008 have been home to more than half of all human beings. In these dense throngs, pathogens can more easily spread and more quickly evolve resistance to drugs. Not coincidentally, the total number of outbreaks per decade has more than tripled since the 1980s.
Globalization compounds the risk: Airplanes now carry almost 10 times as many passengers around the world as they did four decades ago. In the '80s, HIV showed how potent new diseases can be, by launching a slow-moving pandemic that has since claimed about 35-million lives. In 2003, another newly-discovered virus, sars, spread decidedly more quickly. This is a new epoch of disease, when geographic barriers disappear and threats, that once would have been local, go global.
The United States has nation-wide vaccination programs, advanced hospitals, the latest diagnostic tests. In the National Institutes of Health, it has the world's largest biomedical research establishment, and in the CDC, arguably the world's strongest public-health agency. America is as ready to face down new diseases as any country in the world.
Yet even the U.S. is disturbingly vulnerable - and in some respects is becoming quickly more so. It depends on a just-in-time medical economy, in which stockpiles are limited and even key items are made to order. Most of the intravenous bags used in the country are manufactured in Puerto Rico, so when Hurricane Maria devastated the island last September, the bags fell in short supply. Some hospitals were forced to inject saline with syringes - and so syringe supplies started running low, too. The most-common life-saving drugs all depend on long supply chains that include India and China - chains that would likely break in a severe pandemic. "Each year, the system gets leaner and leaner", says Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. "It doesn't take much of a hiccup anymore to challenge it."
Perhaps most important, the U.S. is prone to the same forgetfulness and shortsightedness that befall all nations, rich and poor - and the myopia has worsened considerably in recent years. Public-health programs are low on money; hospitals are stretched perilously thin; crucial funding is being slashed. And while we tend to think of science when we think of pandemic response, the worse the situation, the more the defense depends on political leadership.
When Ebola flared in 2014, the science-minded President Barack Obama calmly and quickly took the reins. The White House is now home to a president who is neither calm nor science-minded. We should not underestimate what that may mean if risk becomes reality.
American hospitals, which often operate unnervingly-close to full capacity, likewise struggled with the surge of patients. Pediatric units were hit especially hard by H1N1, and staff became exhausted from continuously caring for sick children. Hospitals almost ran out of the life-support units that sustain people whose lungs and hearts start to fail. The health-care system didn't break, but it came too close for comfort - especially for what turned out to be a training-wheels pandemic. The 2009 H1N1 strain killed merely 0.03% of those it infected; by contrast, the 1918 strain had killed 1 to 3%, and the H7N9 strain currently circulating in China has a fatality rate of 40%.
That the U.S. could be so ill-prepared for flu, of all things, should be deeply concerning. The country has a dedicated surveillance web, antiviral drugs, and an infrastructure for making and deploying flu vaccines. None of that exists for the majority of other emerging infectious diseases.
The Hospital Preparedness Program is a funding plan that was created in the wake of 9/11 to help hospitals ready themselves for disasters, run training drills, and build their surge capacity - everything that Shelly Schwedhelm's team does so well in Nebraska. It transformed emergency planning from an after-hours avocation into an actual profession, carried out by skilled specialists. But since 2003, its $514-Million budget has been halved. Another fund - the Public Health Emergency Preparedness program - was created at the same time to help state and local health departments keep an eye on infectious diseases, improve their labs, and train epidemiologists. Its budget has been pruned to 70% of its $940-Million peak. Small wonder, then, that in the past decade, local health departments have cut more than 55,000 jobs. That's 55,000 people who won't be there to answer the call when the next epidemic hits.
These sums of money are paltry compared with what another pandemic might cost the country. Diseases are exorbitantly expensive. In response to just 10 cases of Ebola in 2014, the U.S. spent $1.1-Billion on domestic preparations, including $119-Million on screening and quarantine. A severe 1918-style flu pandemic would drain an estimated $683-Billion from American coffers, according to the nonprofit Trust for America's Health. The World Bank estimates that global output would fall by almost 5% - totaling some $4-Trillion.
The U.S. is not unfamiliar with the concept of preparedness. It currently spends roughly half-a-trillion dollars on its military - the highest defense budget in the world, equal to the combined budgets of the next seven top countries. But against viruses - more likely to kill millions than any rogue state is - such consistent investments are nowhere to be found.
Organizing a federal response to an emerging pandemic is harder than one might think. The largely successful U.S. response to Ebola in 2014 benefited from the special appointment of an "Ebola czar" - Ron Klain - to help coordinate the many agencies that face unclear responsibilities. In 2016, when Obama asked for $1.9-Billion to fight Zika, Congress devolved into partisan squabbling. Republicans wanted to keep the funds away from clinics that worked with Planned Parenthood, and Democrats opposed the restriction. It took more than seven months to appropriate $1.1-Billion; by then, the CDC and NIH had been forced to divert funds meant to deal with flu, HIV, and the next Ebola.
At some point, a new virus will emerge to test Trump's mettle. What happens then? He has no background in science or health, and has surrounded himself with little such expertise. The President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, a group of leading scientists who consult on policy matters, is dormant. The Office of Science and Technology Policy, which has advised presidents on everything from epidemics to nuclear disasters since 1976, is diminished. The head of that office typically acts as the president's chief scientific consigliere, but to date no one has been appointed. Other parts of Trump's administration that will prove crucial during an epidemic have operated like an Etch-A-Sketch. During the nine months I spent working on this story, Tom Price resigned as secretary of health and human services after using taxpayer money to fund charter flights (although his replacement, Alex Azar, is arguably better prepared, having dealt with anthrax, flu, and sars during the Bush years). Brenda Fitzgerald stepped down as CDC director after it became known that she had bought stock in tobacco companies; her replacement, Robert Redfield, has a long track record studying HIV, but relatively little public-health experience. Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer, a veteran malaria fighter, was appointed to the National Security Council, in part to oversee the development of the White House's forthcoming biosecurity strategy. When I met Ziemer at the White House in February, he hadn't spoken with the president, but said pandemic preparedness was a priority for the administration. He left in May.

ADL H.E.A.T. Map (ADL, August 9, 2018)

Mapped: How Every Part Of The World Has Warmed – And Could Continue To Warm (Carbon Brief, September 26, 2018)

The Future Of Electric Cars Is China (Quartz, series beginning December 10, 2018)
The world awaits an electric-car future, but that future is rapidly becoming the present in China. The country is on track to sell more than 1-million electric vehicles in 2018, nearly as much as the rest of the world combined. And with tens-of-billions of dollars already invested to build up an electric-car infrastructure (and tens-of-billions more on the way), China is not letting up in its pace to become the world leader in EVs.

The Great Filter - The Most Important Question In History (Daily Kos, November 3, 2018)

Trump's Hidden Powers (Brennan Center for Justice, December 5, 2018)
A vast array of obscure presidential powers spans everything from the military to criminal law, and some are ripe for abuse. They need to be re-examined.
Building on previous research in this area, the Brennan Center has identified 123 statutory powers that may become available to the president when she declares a national emergency. An additional 13 statutory powers become available when a national emergency is declared by Congress. We created a database that assembles these 136 powers by subject matter, specifies the conditions triggering their use, and lists the occasions, if any, on which they have been invoked. (The methodology we used to compile the database is available here.) We have also developed a running list of national emergencies declared since the National Emergencies Act went into effect.
These resources are eye-opening in many ways: in the nature of the powers provided, in how easily the executive can access them, and in how they have been used (or misused).

In Case Of Emergency: What Can A President Do During A State Of Emergency? (The Atlantic, January-February 2019)
From seizing control of the internet to declaring martial law, President Trump may legally do all kinds of extraordinary things.
More is at stake here than the outcome of one or even two elections. Trump has long signaled his disdain for the concepts of limited presidential power and democratic rule. During his 2016 campaign, he praised murderous dictators. He declared that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, would be in jail if he were president, goading crowds into frenzied chants of "Lock her up." He hinted that he might not accept an electoral loss. As democracies around the world slide into autocracy, and nationalism and anti-democratic sentiment are on vivid display among segments of the American populace, Trump's evident hostility to key elements of liberal democracy cannot be dismissed as mere bluster.

Voices From The Field; FBI-Agent Accounts Of The Real Consequences Of The Government Shutdown (FBI Agents Assn., January 2019)
If the FBI and Dept. of Justice are not funded, the Agents will continue to face challenges in carrying out our mission to protect the nation.

50 Moments That Define An Improbable Presidency (The Atlantic, January 21, 2019)

Tracking Trump: The President's Standing Across America (Morning Consult)
On a daily basis, Morning Consult is surveying over 5,000 registered voters across the United States on President Trump. Each month, we'll update this page with the latest survey data, providing a clear picture of Trump's approval and re-election prospects.

Russia Investigation Summary (Teri Kanefield, continuing)
Muller Probe Overview: Documents Filed, Crimes, etc.

A Timeline of Earth's Average Temperature Since The Last Ice Age Glaciation (xkcd)

Global Climate Change; Vital Signs Of The Planet (NASA, current)

Climate Change (United Nations)

Bernie Sanders: The Green New Deal (2019)

Umair Haque: Why the Anglo World is Collapsing; How the Dunces of Modern History Ended Up Being Us (Eudaimonia & Co., March 27, 2019)
The rest of the rich world has learned the great lesson of history, that cooperative nonviolence is the hand of progress. Social democracy is based on that principle. And it's not a coincidence that social democracies are all forging ahead, whether Sweden or Canada, even in troubled times - while we Anglos are collapsing into the abyss of what supremacy must lead to: extremism, fascism, authoritarianism. All the things that are the opposite of democracy.

Sizing Up the Carbon Footprint of Cities (NASA, April 11, 2019)
Large and wealthy cities have the biggest carbon footprints.

Earthquake and Volcano Activity, Worldwide, 2001-2015 (NASA, NOAA)

Nancy Pelosi, by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Time100, 2019)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by Elizabeth Warren (Time100, 2019)

Greta Thunberg, by Emma González (Time100, 2019)

The Privacy Project (New York Times, 2019)

Zero Waste: Our country has a waste problem. It's time for new solutions, and a renewed commitment to move toward zero waste. (MassPIRG, 2019)

50 Days To The Moon (Fast Company, 2019)

On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt (Princeton University)
I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis.

It's Time To Break Up Facebook, by Chris Hughes (New York Times, May 9, 2019)
Mr. Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, is a co-chairman of the Economic Security Project and a senior adviser at the Roosevelt Institute:
"Mark Zuckerberg's personal reputation and the reputation of Facebook have taken a nose-dive. The company's mistakes - the sloppy privacy practices that dropped tens of millions of users' data into a political consulting firm's lap; the slow response to Russian agents, violent rhetoric and fake news; and the unbounded drive to capture ever more of our time and attention - dominate the headlines.
Mark's influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms - Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - that billions of people use every day. Facebook's board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60% of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook's algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.
"Mark is a good, kind person. But I'm angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. I'm disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders. And I'm worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them. The government must hold Mark accountable."

Demand An Impeachment Inquiry. (Common Cause, July 25, 2019)
No American, especially not the President, is above the law.

Leading Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Copying Hitler's Early Rhetoric And Policies. (Common Cause, August 9, 2019)
Burt Neuborne questions whether federal government can contain Trump and GOP power grabs.
Many recent presidents have been awful, but then there was Donald Trump, the only president in recent American history to openly despise the twin ideals - individual dignity and fundamental equality - upon which the contemporary United States is built. When you confront the reality of a president like Trump, the state of both sets of brakes - internal [constitutional] and external [public resistance] - become hugely important because Donald Trump's political train runs on the most potent and dangerous fuel of all: a steady diet of fear, greed, loathing, lies, and envy. It's a toxic mixture that has destroyed democracies before, and can do so again.
Give Trump credit. He did his homework well and became the twenty-first-century master of divisive rhetoric. We're used to thinking of Hitler's Third Reich as the incomparably evil tyranny that it undoubtedly was. But Hitler didn't take power by force. He used a set of rhetorical tropes - codified in Trump's bedside reading - that persuaded enough Germans to welcome Hitler as a populist leader. The Nazis did not overthrow the Weimar Republic. It fell into their hands as the fruit of Hitler's satanic ability to mesmerize enough Germans to trade their birthright for a pottage of scapegoating, short-term economic gain, xenophobia, and racism. It could happen here.

United States Of Plastic (The Guardian, August 2019)

100 Photos - The Most Influential Images Of All Time (Time Magazine, 2016)
Explore the stories behind 100 images that changed the world, selected by TIME and an international team of curators.bit
Top 100 Photos of 2018 (Time Magazine)

Globalization Isn't Dying, It's Just Evolving. (Bloomberg, July 23, 2019)
We are entering a new era in which data is the new shipping container and there are far more disruptive forces at work in the world economy than Trump's tariffs. New manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing and the automation of factories are reducing the economic incentives to offshore production. The smartphones we carry with us are not just products of globalization but accelerants for it. For good or bad, we are more exposed to a global culture of ideas than we have ever been. And we are only becoming more global as a result.

The 1619 Project (The New York Times, August 14, 2019)
In August of 1619, a ship appeared on the horizon near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. In the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

"Tending Soil", by Emma Marris (with podcast; Emergence Magazine, October 2019)
In almost every culture, Earth is female: Mother Earth, Gaia, Pachamama, Terra, Prithvi - goddesses that, like the soil, have the power to create new life. The mystery of working with soil is that the best way to make it more fertile - more life-giving - is to mix in dead things. Soil is the medium through which death becomes life. It is the liminal stuff that exists after death and rot but before sprouting life, growth, and nourishment.

Millionaires Surtax: A Winning Issue In 2020 (Surtax, October 2019)

WMO Provisional Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019 (World Meteorological Association, December 3, 2019)

Global Transport of Smoke from Australian Bushfires (2-min. video; NASA)

The Deep Sea (Neal Agarwal)

The philosophy of cynicism (5-min. video; TEDEd, December 19, 2019)
Explore the ancient Greek philosophy of cynicism, which calls for the rejection of materialism and conformity in favor of a simple life.

The 21st-Century American Axis Of Evil (Jonathan Gordon, 2019)

The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report (U.S. House Intelligence Committee, December 3, 2019
Also, here is CNN's annotated version.

Impeachment in the United States (Wikipedia)

President Trump House Impeachment Brief (U.S. House of Representatives, January 18, 2020)

Tracking President Trump's Unprecedented Conflicts of Interest (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington)

Environmental Voter Guide (Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, 2020)
We graded the 2020 Democratic candidates on four key environmental areas, and produced this environmental report card.

100th Anniversary Of The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, January 2020)
"So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy." - ACLU founder Roger Baldwin
When a roomful of civil liberties activists - led by Roger Baldwin, Crystal Eastman, and Albert DeSilver - formed the ACLU in 1920, the Supreme Court had yet to uphold a single free speech claim. Activists languished in jail for distributing anti-war literature. State-sanctioned violence against African-Americans was routine. Women won the right to vote only in August of that year. And constitutional rights for LGBT people were unthinkable.
The ACLU was founded to ensure the promise of the Bill of Rights and to expand its reach to people historically denied its protections. In our first year, we fought the harassment and deportation of immigrants whose activism put them at odds with the authorities. In 1939, we won in the Supreme Court the right for unions to organize. We stood almost alone in 1942 in denouncing our government's round-up and internment in concentration camps of more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans. And at times in our history when frightened civilians have been willing to give up some of their freedoms and rights in the name of national security, the ACLU has been the bulwark for liberty.

There Isn't A Simple Story About Looting. (Vox, June 2, 2020)
"The question you have to ask yourself is: Why are there so many people in our society who don't have a lot to lose?" says sociologist Darnell Hunt.

Neo-Völkisch (Southern Poverty Law Center)
Born out of an atavistic defiance of modernity and rationalism, present-day neo-Völkisch, or Folkish, adherents and groups are organized around ethnocentricity and archaic notions of gender.

Political Coordinates Test (Individual Differences Research, 2020)
This free political observance test will allow you to obtain your scores on the two major political scales found in Western democracies. Though there are several other "political coordinates" and "political observance" tests in existence, these tests have commonly been criticized for seeking to trick the respondent into answering in a certain way, for example by applying spin to the questions or framing them in such a way as to provoke emotional reactions in the respondent. By contrast, this test attempts to simply confront you with the questions without any coating or spin.

Benjamin Franklin and the Power of Long-Term Investing (Edelman Financial Engines, 2020)
Remembered for being a publisher, scientist, diplomat and inventor, he was also the first truly long-term investor.

Deciphering Russia's "Sovereign Internet Law"; Tightening Control and Accelerating the Splinternet (DGAP, January 16, 2020)
In November 2019, Vladimir Putin's regime introduced new regulations that create a legal framework for centralized state management of the internet within Russia's borders. Although full implementation will be extremely difficult, this framework will likely lead to tighter state control over society and additional complications for domestic and foreign companies. The regulations are expected to accelerate the fragmentation of the global internet and to increase Russian reliance on Chinese technology.

Shoshana Zuboff: You Are Now Remotely Controlled. (New York Times, January 24, 2020)
The belief that privacy is private has left us careening toward a future that we did not choose. Surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth.

The Day Democracy Died (9-min. YouTube video sung by The Founding Fathers, February 8, 2020)

White-Collar Crime (Huffington Post, February 10, 2020)
Over the last two years, nearly every institution of American life has taken on the unmistakable stench of moral rot. Corporate behemoths like Boeing and Wells Fargo have traded blue-chip credibility for white-collar callousness. Elite universities are selling admission spots to the highest Hollywood bidder. Silicon Valley unicorns have revealed themselves as long cons (Theranos), venture-capital cremation devices (Uber, WeWork) or straightforward comic book supervillains (Facebook). Every week unearths a cabinet-level political scandal that would have defined any other presidency. From the blackouts in California to the bloated bonuses on Wall Street to the entire biography of Jeffrey Epstein, it is impossible to look around the country and not get the feeling that elites are slowly looting it.
And why wouldn't they? The criminal justice system has given up all pretense that the crimes of the wealthy are worth taking seriously. The rich are enjoying a golden age of impunity unprecedented in modern history. Elite deviance has become the dark matter of American life, the invisible force around which the country's most powerful legal and political systems have set their orbit.

A Short History Of Arson (Phys.org, December 5, 2014)
Arson has evolved from a wrongful individual act into an effective means of collective violence.

Opinion Polls (Civiqs)

The Long-Term Impact of DACA: Forging Futures Despite DACA's Uncertainty (Harvard University, 2019)
The experiences of our respondents over the last seven years powerfully highlight the importance and success of DACA—the results are indisputable. DACA has given its beneficiaries and their families a giant boost and they have achieved significant social mobility. It has also powerfully shaped personhood and agency. Nevertheless, the temporary and partial nature of DACA leaves many issues unaddressed and has created some new dilemmas. The findings of this report have clear implications for U.S. immigration policy and community practice.
In the last section, we offer a set of recommendations for policymakers, stakeholders, and educators. Ultimately, we believe that a broader immigration reform that includes a pathway to legalization would resolve most challenges experienced by DACA beneficiaries and their families. However, we also acknowledge that needs are urgent, and that a range of community stakeholders may be able to address many issues locally and immediately.

Land Doesn't Vote, People Do. This Electoral Map Tells the Real Story. (animated Electoral College map; Democracy Labs, November 11, 2019)

Private Gain Must No Longer Be Allowed To Elbow Out The Public Good. (Aeon, April 24, 2020)
The logic of private interest – the notion that we should just "let the market handle it" – has serious limitations. Particularly in the United States, the lack of an effective health and social policy in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has brought the contradictions into high relief.
Around the world, the free market rewards competing, positioning and elbowing, so these have become the most desirable qualifications people can have. Empathy, solidarity or concern for the public good are relegated to the family, houses of worship or activism. Meanwhile, the market and private gain don't account for social stability, health or happiness. As a result, from Cape Town to Washington, the market system has depleted and ravaged the public sphere – public health, public education, public access to a healthy environment – in favour of private gain.
Simply put, a market system driven by private interests never has protected and never will protect public health, essential kinds of freedom and communal well-being. Many have pointed out the immorality of our system of greed and self-centred gain, its inefficiency, its cruelty, its shortsightedness and its danger to planet and people. But, above all, the logic of self-interest is superficial in that it fails to recognise the obvious: every private accomplishment is possible only on the basis of a thriving commons – a stable society and a healthy environment.

Free Resource to Help your Family Separate COVID Facts from Fiction (Tumblehome, June 3, 2020)
The best way to investigate a questionable scientific-sounding claim is to ask good questions. You can remember the following three sets of questions using the acronym SAP. A "sap" is a fool, and no one wants to be fooled by misinformation!
1. Sources:
    Are there good references provided so you know what experts think?
    Do well-qualified people have a different point of view than the one presented?
2. Author:
    Where did the claim come from?
    Is the claim made by a qualified scientist, a reputable group or website?
    Can you even tell who the author is?
3. Purpose:
    Why was the information made available?
    Is it because somebody is selling something? In which case, we should be extra careful before believing what they say.
    Is the purpose to stir up your emotions, to change your vote, or to provide information?
    Do well-qualified people have a different point of view than the one presented?
Science is the pursuit of explanations of the natural world. It is deeply rooted in the minds of human beings, who for millennia have demonstrated a need to understand the world around them. A full discussion of the nature of science requires more than this one page.
However, if you want to more closely examine "science – fact or fiction?", WGBH's NOVA, Andy Zucker and our founder Penny Noyce created a FREE one-week unit for grades 6-12 called "Resisting Scientific Misinformation," available HERE.
HERE is a list of organizations that might have reliable advice and answers to some of your questions.
Don't be a SAP – stay informed…and stay safe!

Joe Biden's Vision For America (Biden for President, July 4, 2020)

Inside the Revolutionary Treatment That Could Change Psychotherapy Forever (Medium, July 21, 2020)
All too often, patients in today's U.S. mental health system fall into a downward spiral of increasing diagnoses and increasing medication. Now Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy is upending the thinking around schizophrenia, depression, OCD, and more.
Though psychiatric medications have brought relief to millions of patients, the impact of long-term use of many drugs is only starting to become clear: chemical dependency, mounting side effects, and fundamental changes in the neurochemistry of the brain. For patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the effect is particularly severe. Numerous studies have found that schizophrenics fare worse on long-term antipsychotics, though it remains the standard of care.
Between 85% and 90% of schizophrenic patients are unemployed in the United States, one of the most difficult places on Earth to live with the diagnosis. In a 1992 World Health Organization study of schizophrenia that continues to spark controversy in the field, patients in developing countries healed and went into remission at significantly higher rates than their counterparts in developed countries like the United States.
IFS has recently been the subject of a lot of chatter in the psychotherapy community. It is based on a novel theory of the mind so profoundly at odds with the biomedical model of mental illness that, if true, called decades of clinical orthodoxy into question. In IFS, mental health symptoms like anxiety, depression, paranoia, and even psychosis are regarded not as impassive biochemical phenomena, but as emotional events under the control of unconscious "parts" of the patient - which he/she can learn to interact with directly.
[This new IFS reminds me of Eric Berne's old Transactional Analysis ("I'm Okay, You're Okay" and "Games People Play"), revisited - which may be A Good Thing.]

MAGA2020.com (Donald Trump's vision)

ChooseDemocracy.org
Democracy is fragile. We have reason to worry that we may see an undemocratic power grab this Fall - a coup. We also know that the people can defend our democracy. Nonviolent mass protests have stopped coups in other places, and we may have to do the same in this country.

2020 U.S. Election Forecast (FiveThirtyEight, 2020)
[Why FiveThirtyEight? Let Daily Kos explain, or read his 2016 prediction.]

Five Takeaways From Final Senate Intel Russia Report (The Hill, August 18, 2020)

Animated Map: The History Of U.S. Counties (Visual Capitalist, July 31, 2020)
This quick-moving animation shows how the U.S. county map has evolved since the 17th century.

Coyote Safety (Town of Natick, Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife)
Including good "Coyotes 101" slide show re new population of Eastern Coyotes.

Donald J. Trump Library
Putting the 45th President's work in historical context, while documenting the damage done to American institutions and spirit.

CISA Rumor-Control Page (3-min. video; U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, October 2020)

LittleSis Tracks The Political Connections And Lobbying Of The Ultra-Rich And Corporations. (Democracy Labs, November 16, 2020)

2020 Was The Year That Changed Everything. (Maclean's/Canada, November 17, 2020)
The pandemic, political upheaval and an economic crisis have exploded truths and ideas that mere months ago seemed so fundamental they were beyond question.
14 things we thought were true before 2020: Democracy is our destiny? Not sure about that anymore. Rich countries can overcome? Doesn't seem like it. In a crisis, leaders will lead? If you're lucky. All the 'truths' 2020 has called into question...

How Albert Einstein Reconciled Religion To Science (Nautilus, November 25, 2020)
- The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely-primitive, legends. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me.
- I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
- I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.
May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.
I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.
[Hmm. "Spinoza's God" is my "G.O.D." - my own conclusion, many years ago, that it stands for General Over-all Design.]

The Rich Kids Who Want To Tear Down Capitalism (New York Times, November 27, 2020)
Socialist-minded millennial heirs are trying to live their values by getting rid of their money.

Mueller, She Wrote (Threadreader, November 2020)

How To Get Rid Of The Electoral College (Brookings Institution, December 9, 2020)
The Electoral College Is A Ticking Time Bomb. (Brookings Institution, December 9, 2020)

FBI's Website On Terrorism (as of January 8, 2021)
Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature. Protecting the United States from terrorist attacks is the FBI's number-one priority.

Amsterdam Is Embracing A Radical New Economic Theory To Help Save The Environment. Could It Also Replace Capitalism? (Time, January 22, 2021)
The Doughnut Economics Theory argues that 20th-Century economic thinking is not equipped to deal with the 21st-Century reality of a planet teetering on the edge of climate breakdown. Instead of equating a growing GDP with a successful society, our goal should be to fit all of human life into the "sweet spot" between the "social foundation", where everyone has what they need to live a good life, and the "environmental ceiling". By and large, people in rich countries are living above the environmental ceiling. Those in poorer countries often fall below the social foundation. The space in between: that's the doughnut.
In 1990, British economist Kate Raworth, now 50, arrived at Oxford University to study economics. She quickly became frustrated by the content of the lectures, she recalls over Zoom from her home office in Oxford, where she now teaches. She was learning about ideas from decades and sometimes centuries ago: supply and demand, efficiency, rationality and economic growth as the ultimate goal. "The concepts of the 20th century emerged from an era in which humanity saw itself as separated from the web of life", Raworth says. In this worldview, she adds, environmental issues are relegated to what economists call "externalities". "It's just an ultimate absurdity that in the 21st-Century, when we know we are witnessing the death of the living world unless we utterly transform the way we live, that death of the living world is called 'an environmental externality.'"

NEW: Thomas Friedman: Made In The U.S.A.: Socialism For The Rich. Capitalism For The Rest. (New York Times, January 26, 2021)
There has been so much focus in recent years on the downsides of rapid globalization and "neo-liberal free-market group-think" - influencing both Democrats and Republicans - that we've ignored another, more powerful consensus that has taken hold on both parties: That we are in a new era of permanently-low interest rates, so deficits don't matter as long as you can service them, and so the role of government in developed countries can keep expanding - which it has with steadily larger bailouts, persistent deficit spending, mounting government debts and increasingly easy money out of Central Banks to finance it all.
This new consensus has a name: "Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest" - a variation on a theme popularized in the 1960s. It happens when government intervention does more to stimulate the financial markets than the real economy. So, America's richest 10%, who own more than 80% of U.S. stocks, have seen their wealth more than triple in 30 years, while the bottom 50%, relying on their day jobs in real markets to survive, had zero gains. Meanwhile, mediocre productivity in the real economy has limited opportunity, choice and income gains for the poor and middle class alike.
[Legalized theft on the grand scale! Also see, The Rescues Ruining Capitalism (Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2020).]

Philip Bump: How To Rig An America (Washington Post, January 29, 2021)
If you live in a heavily Republican area and don't personally know anyone supporting Biden, it's easy to see why you might be skeptical of the idea that Biden won the election, including the popular vote by some 7-million votes. In the states that swung from Trump to Biden last year, a third of voters live in counties Trump or Biden won by at least 30 points. In Georgia, 33% of voters live in counties where Trump won by that margin.
Even if you aren't skeptical of the idea that Biden won by that margin, though, it's easy to see why you might be wary of the election results. The federal government is now entirely under the control of Democratic politicians, most of whom live in states that voted for Biden, such as California and New York. (Most Trump voters also live in states Biden won, but that's neither here nor there.) If you're a Republican in a heavily Republican area in a Republican-led state, accepting that Democrats won unified control of the government may be more disconcerting than thinking they didn't. After all, it suggests a significant political shift away from what you support.
If you are a Republican elected official or political actor, the concern is heightened. Your party has been at a disadvantage nationally for some time, with the number of Americans who identify as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents hovering at or near 50% for a while, according to Gallup polling. Demographic trends don't bode well, with younger Americans leaning more heavily Democratic than older Americans - and with younger Americans inevitably constituting more of the electorate as time progresses.
This sets up a tricky moment. Republican leaders see how the party's power is poised to fade - looking no further than those shifts that flipped Arizona and Georgia in last year's elections. (And, for Georgia, this year's: Hard as it may be to believe, its Senate runoff contests were this month.) The Republican base, meanwhile, is skeptical that its power will fade, particularly when the former president of the United States is out there insisting that it hasn't. It's a moment in which there is both incentive to game the system and support for doing so.
So Republicans are trying to game the system - to game a system that's already often rigged to their advantage.

NEW: We Now Have A 4th Stage Of Existence, And It May Be The End Of Us All. (Medium, February 6, 2021)
We need a new plan for the last 30 years of life.

Net Zero By 2050: A Roadmap For The Global Energy Sector (74-min. video; International Energy Agency, May 18, 2021)
[The official report.]

26th UN Climate-Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) (United Nations, October 31 - November 12, 2021)
Learn about how the negotiations at COP26 went and the outcomes achieved in the documents within.

The American Presidency Project (University of California, Santa Barbara)
[Compare, for example, the 1912 Democratic Party Platform to this year's.]

UNREPRESENTATIVES (Indivisible, March 2023)
There are 18 Republicans who won districts in the midterms that Joe Biden won in 2020. This handful of representatives ensured that MAGA extremism would claim power in Congress. They stood by as Kevin McCarthy cut deals with extremists. They've empowered Marjorie Taylor Greene and her MAGA allies. They've attacked abortion rights and threatened essential programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Some ran as moderates. Some refused to talk to voters. And one straight-up lied about his resume and identity entirely. But they all have one thing in common: They've been voting in lockstep with the MAGA majority - even though their constituents oppose MAGA extremism. They don't represent the voters of their district. And for the next two years, we're going to hold them accountable for their extremism.

-- This is the end, the very end. Or was it the beginning? --