Month: August 2016

How To Lose All Your Facebook Friends In A Single Post

The longer I spend talking to people about the upcoming presidential elections, the more I’m convinced that Mencken was right:  The American people know what they want, and deserve to get it — good and hard. (more…)

EpiPens aren’t the problem.

(For those few of you who’ve been living in a cave in northern Nunavut for the past ten days, you might have missed Ben Popken’s story on the EpiPen price gouge.  Go read it, then come back and join the rest of the class.  Slacker.)

I’m going to call “bullshit”. Once again, the American Media, courtesy of political campaigns, is indulging the American Media Consumer — blinkered, pig-ignorant, and proud of it — in a pointless round of outrage at nothing.

Look, the basic problem isn’t the damn EpiPen, or that some CEO got a raise of $18 million. It’s that we have a system where people make a profit from other people being sick, and nobody is even remotely interested in changing it. (more…)

Don’t Waste Your Vote

Is Donald Trump a dangerous madman?  Is Hillary Clinton assassinating her political foes?  Is someone rigging the ballots and cheating us out of our elections?

I’m pretty sure Trump is far more clever and personable than he lets on, and I’m also quite certain that nobody who’s as much in the spotlight as Senator Clinton could sneak away from her Secret Service entourage long enough to commit murder.  But the answer to that third question is an emphatic “YES!” (more…)

Is Voting Third Party Wrong?

NOTE:  This is intended as a response to an article by T. N. Reider published at “The Conversation” entitled “Is the ‘lesser of two evils’ an ethical choice for voters?”  That article is well-written, and I recommend reading it.  All quotes come from there.

As I’ve discussed in other articles, despair is endemic in this country.  The presidential politics of this year underline this in a fashion seldom seen before, with the fiercest supporters of each candidate shouting loudly that their pick for president isn’t quite as bad as the only other choice.  People have stopped questioning the system, which seems to guarantee that the worst possible candidate always gains their party’s nomination.  Instead they like to shout at one another about how the other option is worse.

One thing that cannot be denied:  Americans hate both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and they do so in record numbers.  We haven’t seen this level (more…)