Notes On The Collapse

On Accepting Refugees: Pros And Cons

(NOTE:  This article has been revised again; the pros and cons listed have been kept up to date, even though the intro is vintage campaign.)

Major media outlets are full of reactions to recent announcements that the President will be asking to increase the ceiling on Syrian refugee acceptance for next year.  Unsurprisingly, the stories are largely focused on the reaction to the announcement; contention drives the media profit mill, and so it would be unusual to see any other form of response from them.

Since it’s the height of the upcoming Presidential election cycle, it’s also not surprising that every hopeful candidate has (more…)

Bread And Circuses: Why We Need Them

We all know the quote “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” It’s a paraphrase from a work by Karl Marx. Most of us have no idea of the context or his intended meaning.

“…Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion (more…)

Healthcare: In Order To Fix A Problem…

The first step toward a solution is to know what the problem is.

Healthcare in this country has been the subject of widespread and highly politicized debate in recent years.  Most of us agree that there’s something wrong, but we tend to disagree on what, exactly, that might be.  It’s little wonder that the solutions that we try are subject to controversy — and that controversy includes widespread civil disobedience, of a type and breadth not seen since the civil rights era of the 1960s and 70s.

The trouble is, we don’t know what precisely is wrong.  We haven’t diagnosed it.  So… (more…)

Must God exist for you to know what is right?

“Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says “love thy neighbor as thyself,” they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference (more…)

It’s Not The One Percent, Dammit!

There is more than one valid and effective solution to our problems. Unfortunately, the political parties in our strongly divided system are far more concerned with blaming one another than in getting anything done. This is hardly a purely American phenomenon, of course; that’s just a handy example.

The evident solution is NOT to discard parties and then recreate the process from the ground up. Instead, it’s to get (more…)

Amazon Is Evil: Why Do I Still Link To Them?

For background, please read the post that inspired me out on Steven Brust’s blog, plus the original article he linked in his post. If you already think Amazon is evil, you might want to skip these; alternately, if you read them both, you’ll be able to feel more justified in your indignation. If, on the other (third?) hand, you feel that all corporations everywhere are evil… (more…)

In A Few Words

How provoking! This website wants me to compose a tagline, thus:  “In a few words, tell us what this page is about.”

Look, mate — if I knew what the frigging page was about already, I wouldn’t need to write it, now would I?  Bloody cheek!
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All right; most of you who are reading this probably don’t have a clue what that’s supposed to mean, why that simple little request has me (more…)

Jefferson County Letters (Reference)

This is not a stand-alone article, but rather a reference resource for another article.  In it is reproduced the text of two communications to The Not Fake News from the office of the County Clerk of Jefferson County, Kentucky relating to the primary of 23 June 2020.  To remove this from the stream narrative and for purely technical reasons, this has been back-dated several years; however, it should be clear that the emails were received on the 20th and 22nd of June 2020 respectively. (more…)