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Monday 29th of April 2024

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Authoritarianism The story of the last two decades is not just one of democratic weaknesses; it is also one of authoritarian strength. Yascha Mounk, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Authoritarianism They are imprisoning one person to frighten millions. Alexei Navalny, on being sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail for missing penal meetings in Russia because he was recuperating in Germany after being poisoned by Putin © 2021 Kwiple.com
Automation Sales of automation software are expected to rise by 28 percent this year, after increasing 12 percent last year, according to the research firm Gartner. And the consulting firm McKinsey, which predicted before the pandemic that 37 million U.S. workers would be displaced by automation by 2030, recently increased its projection to 45 million. Kevin Roose, New York Times, March 6, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Bad news We will be back in some form . . . we will see you soon. citation Donald Trump, on his final day in office, telling a small crowd of supporters at Joint Base Andrews, before heading to Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Florida, that he wants the limelight again © 2021 Kwiple.com
Biden administration The message that needs to be heard is not about what his administration would like to do for Americans, but about what it must achieve  because the alternative is self-destruction. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, March 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Conservatives Postwar American conservatism, like it counterparts in Europe, understood security as having five dimensions: “national security,” “law and order,” religious and cultural continuity, economic stability for most workers, and regulation for safer products and a less dangerous environment. … To put it crudely, the story of American conservatism since the 1980s is the narrowing of the idea of security by stripping away these last two dimensions and upping the ante on the other three. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, March 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Efficiency You want to prevent the rise of digital dictatorship? Keep things at least a bit inefficient. Yuval Harari, Financial Times, February 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Fear  The opposite of fear is not really hope. It is security. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, March 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Innovation  The process of approval was at odds with the process of improvement. Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, March 8, 2021, on how making even the most minor change to an FDA-approved artificial heart requires that the entire heart be re-submitted for approval, which may take a decade  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Count votes in Congress by: 1. Calculating a Member's Proportional Vote (MPV) for each member, as follows: MPV = SPNP / NLRS where: SPNP = State's Percentage of the National Population NLRS = Number of Legislators Representing the State (in that legislature) 2. Totaling “yes” MPVs and “no” MPVs 3. Passing if total MPV is more than 50 OTHERWISE Abolish the Senate © 2019 Kwiple.com
Minority rule The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotidm in some form is all that is left.  Abraham Lincoln, first inaugural address © 2021 Kwiple.com
Polarization One group's measure of validity is another group's of benightedness. Criteria of canonization and anathematization are interchangeable. One chooses one's gods by choosing one's playmates. Peter L. Berger, An Invitation to Sociology © 2021 Kwiple.com
Post-2020 Senate shituation 15 states (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming) 2020 population: 40,085,414 Senators: 30 Republicans 1 Senator per 1,336,180 people — 1 state (California) 2020 population: 39,368,075 Senators: 2 Democrats 1 Senator per 19,684,037 people 19,684,037 / 1,336,180 = 14.7, therefore: average 15er's vote is worth nearly 15 times a Californian's, a Californian's vote is worth less than 7% of an average 15er's — 1 state (Wyoming) 2020 population = 582,328, therefore: 1 Senator per 291,164 Wyomians, a Wyomian's vote is worth 68 times a Californian's, a Californian's vote is worth 1.5% of a Wyomian's  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Profits The rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the decension, of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 11 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Public discourse America's least-trusted institutions — Congress, television news and big business, says Gallup — are remorselessly heard-from. The most trusted are the military (a closed box to most citizens) and small business (too poor to advertise at scale). … The feeling of your pain, the stakeholder-flattery: ingratiation has been the way of public and private elites during the exact era that trust in them has dropped. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Race A man become as rich as he wants to, he is still a Negro. Or a man may sink as low as it is possible to sink in terms of the mores of society, but he will still be white. Peter L. Berger, An Invitation to Sociology © 2020 Kwiple.com
School spending Right now, we collectively spend about 1,000 times more per student on science,  technoloy, engineering and math education than we do on history and civics. Where civics education is taught, it is often hampered by a lack of consensus about what to teach and how. Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, 2021/03/01, signed by six former U.S. education secretaries: Lamar Alexander, Arne Duncan, John King, Rod Paige, Richard Riley, Margaret Spellings © 2021 Kwiple.com
Science Science cannot replace politics. When we come to decide on policy, we have to take into account many interests and values, and since there is no scientific way to determine which interests and values are more important, there is no scientific way to decide what we should do. Yuval Harari, Financial Times, February 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Selfie I talked like Morse code. Joe Biden, on his years in a Catholic prep school, where he was called Joe Impedimenta because of his stutter © 2021 Kwiple.com
Snapshot We don't know what the Proud Boys are proud of, but it's not their grades. Proud Boys portrayed by Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, March 5, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Society  Society can exist by virtue of the fact that most of the time most people's definitions of the most important situations at least coincide approximately. Peter L. Berger, An Invitation to Sociology © 2021 Kwiple.com
State of the union There are popular laws, beloved laws and President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan … [which] entails $1.9tn of public spending amid a growing economy, under a president of wrongly but widely impugned legitimacy, after two lavish bills to the same end in 12 months. The debate over the wisdom of such largesse  is everywhere except in the general public. … The pandemic has crystallised a thought for which there was once only scattered evidence. But at some point in this century, the US became a mildly social democratic country, in its attitudes if not the reality of its welfare state. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, 2021/03/02 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Surely you jest PHILANTHROPIC FUNDING SOUGHT for pursuing ideas and strategies that, in aggreagate, may represent our best hope for saving the planet. Classified advertisement, New York Review of Books, March 25, 2021 [email address not included above] --> © 2021 Kwiple.com
Trumpism Put diplomatically, during Trump's tenure in office, the United States ceased to be the so-called leader of the free world. Put more bluntly, large parts of the Trump administration  effectively defected to the autocratic camp. Yascha Mounk, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Trumpism There is no discernible Trumpism independent of Trump himself. His presidency was an earthquake, the immediate result of a political landscape  shifting after decades of mounting pressure. Earthquakes do not build anything. They disrupt and destroy, but they are tempory, and they provide the benefit of exposing structues that were sloppily built or that rested on crumbled foundations. … The important question to ask about the earthquake is not about the earthquake at all. It is: What should we build now? Oren Cass, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say I think I disagree with every single word in H.R. 1, including the words “but,” “and,” and “the.” Everything about this bill is rotten to the core. This is a bill as if written in Hell by the Devil himself. Mike Lee, March 10, 2021, on the proposed For the People election reform bill, which would protect voting rights and the integrity of elections by outlawing major voter suppression tactics favored by Republcians like himself © 2021 Kwiple.com
 
< Trumpists say Neanderthals are hunter-gatherers, they're protectors of their family, they are resilient, they're resourceful, they tend to their own. So I think Joe Biden needs to rethink what he is saying. Marsha Blackburn, reponding to Biden's criticism of Republican-led states like Texas that prematurely lifted mask mandates as examples of “Neanderthal thinking” © 2021 Kwiple.com