Category: Politics
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Eugenics Makes a Comeback
Above Photo: 1936 propaganda chart, “The Terrible Legacy of a Female Drunkard (Alcoholic).” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Roland Klemig In light of the proposed budget from the House, which severely cuts aid to the less fortunate and those in need of medical care in favor of extending tax cuts for the wealthy, coupled…
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I Shall Believe
It has only been four days since I said no political posts for a while, and although this touches tangentially on politics, it is not really a political post. What’s on my mind today is something I think is at the root of most of the rancor and division in America. Too many Americans have…
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Labels and Boxes
Last week I had a typical yet interesting Facebook exchange with an Ecuadorian. I believe he spent some time in the US, and may have family there, but mostly he is a musician giving one-man shows around Ecuador. On Inauguration Day, he posted a simple “Welcome to Socialism”. Comments were mixed, mine was rather tame…
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Don’t Lose Your Franchise
It all began with the election of 1952, when a UNIVAC computer correctly predicted the outcome of the presidential election. Now if you look at the election results from that year, it seems like it would have been a no-brainer to predict. After all, Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson by over 6 million votes, and…
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Divided We Fall
I was idly scrolling through FaceBook the other day when I saw a post with what struck me as an uniquely American brag. A young woman proudly stated that she had just spent about two hours in a Target store brazenly unmasked, and had not been asked to leave. She saw this as some kind…
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Locked in Cages
I am an American. I was born in Annapolis Maryland, one of the oldest cities in the nation. I’ve lived and worked in her small towns, her big cities, and some of her beautiful rural lands. We own property in America, pay taxes, and are registered voters. I did tech support in the US Senate,…
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I Hope You Don’t Meme That!
Phone the neighbors, wake the kids, it is time for another Facebook rant! Today’s topic: the misuse of memes as proof of the further dumbing down of America by Facebook. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few decades, you have run across memes on the Internet. Technically, a meme can be…
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Masters of Distraction
There was a cartoon I saw once on the Internet, and I just spent a fruitless 2 hours trying to find it again. This was during a time when talking heads on cable “news” programs were explaining that a large part of the blame for our economic woes was the fact that teachers in Chicago…