Recent kwiples

Tuesday 7th of May 2024

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2020 Presidential primaries For just a moment, it was just this little girl and me, standing in a beautiful, sun- drenched field with lots of laughing and talking in the background. She planted her feet, put her hands on her narrow hips, and looked straight into my eyes. In her dead serious, I'm-warning-you tone, she said: “You better win. I've been waiting for a girl president since … since … since kindergarten! Elizabeth Warren, in Persist , on an encounter with a “little girl of about eight or nine” at a campaign event in a field in St. Paul, Minnesota © 2021 Kwiple.com
2020 Presidential primaries Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobucher and I all had better campaign win-loss records than any of the leading men. Elizabeth Warren, Persist © 2021 Kwiple.com
Budgets Show me yur budget and I'll know your values. At the federal level in 2020, American taxpayers put $72 billion into educating our children, less than 2 percent of all federal spending. That's soup to nuts, everything from preschool grants to funding for special education to helping our kids make it through college. Elizabeth Warren, Persist © 2021 Kwiple.com
Fox News Funny how, according to my brother, Fox could be so truthful about everything else and lie about the one person he actually knew. Yeah, real funny. Elizabeth Warren, Persist, on Fox News' coverage of her during the 2020 presidential primaries © 2021 Kwiple.com
Infrastructure How did that happen in such a short period of time? It happened because we didn't have to do any of the heavy lifting. All of the heavy-lifting infrastructure was already in place for it. There was already a telecommunication network, which became the backbone of the internet. There was already a payment system — it was called the credit card. There was already a transportation network called the US Postal Service, and Royal Mail, and Deutsche Post, all over the world, that could deliver our packages. Jeff Bezos on Amazon's success © 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
Meritocracy Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to scramble up. In other words: whoever says meritocracy says oligarchy. Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites © 2021 Kwiple.com
Military spending [T]he 2020 federal budget for  the Department of Defence is $738 billion. Homeland Security soaked up $47.7 billion;  the State Department got $41 billion. By comparison, the appropriation for the  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2020 was $7.7 billion. The federal budget for planning and enforcing our environmental regulations was $9.4 billion. In other words, for every dollar it spends on defense, the federal government spends a little over two cents on public health and protecting the earth combined. Elizabeth Warren, Persist © 2021 Kwiple.com
Money in politics He [Trump] made Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, his top economic advisor. On his way out of Goldman, Cohn received the promise of a staggering $285 million from the firm. Nice, but the money came with a catch: Cohn wouldn't get the big bucks if he  joined the Red Cross or started teaching in a rural elementary school or just retired. Nope: he could only collect this boatload of money if he left the firm to work in the White House. Elizabeth Warren, Persist © 2021 Kwiple.com
Morality What's truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults but what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us. America's problems have nothing to do with private morality. The breakdown is in public morality — abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is fixed. Robert B. Reich, Beyond Outrage © 2021 Kwiple.com
Oligarchy The road to oligarchy has been paved by a relatively small number of hugely wealthy people with outsized influence over the rules of the game. For the last four decades they have used their growing power and wealth to alter the American system in ways that  further enlarge their power and wealth, compounding and concentrating their dominance over the system. Robert B. Reich, The System © 2021 Kwiple.com
Plans And that's both the beauty and the beast of plans: when they are detailed, they force transparency into the debate. Good plans or bad plans, they all start with a set of facts — or at least the facts the planner is working with. Next they provide a statement of the problem, followed by a plan to fix it. But a complex problem usually means that a lot of different factors are in play, so a plan for solving the problem introduces a lot of complexity. Elizabeth Warren, Persist © 2021 Kwiple.com
Plans I really did have a lot of plans and that seemed right to me. If you decided to run for president and wanted to get a ton of things done, wouldn't you need a lot of plans? And they couldn't be wing-and-a-prayer plans. They had to be serious plans. Detailed plans. Plans with enough information that anyone could see the costs, the trade-offs, and the values that they embodied. Elizabeth Warren, Persist, on her run in the 2020 presidential primaries © 2021 Kwiple.com
Pluralism The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent. E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America © 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
Poverty [T]he single best predictor of going broke in America was [found by analyzing data] to be a woman with a child. Not a woman alone. Not a couple with no kids. Not elderly or African American or Latina. One kid. Two kids. It didn't matter. The strongest  predictor was to be a woman with at least one child. Elizabeth Warren, Persist  [2021] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Republican Party At some point, the blame for modern Republicanism must pass from the party to an electorate that could cure it at once by levying harsher political costs. Until then, the strictly tactical case for renouncing either Trump or his fabled-ism will remain weak within the party. Moderate Republicans are left to petition their colleagues' consciences and principles instead. It is only necessary to read that sentence to despair of their chances. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, April 27, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Republican Party Right now, it's basically the Titanic. We're like, you know, in the middle of this slow sink. We have a band playing on the deck telling everybody it's fine. And meanwhile, as I've said, you know, Donald Trump's running around trying to find women's clothing and get on the first lifeboat. Adam Kinzinger, May 8, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Republican Party We cannot be dragged backward by the very dangerous lies of a former president. Liz Cheney, after being stripped of her role as House GOP conference chair on May 12, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Selfie My toenails don't really fit right and I can't see too well on Tuesdays. Bob Dylan © 2021 Kwiple.com
Selfie I probably represented the worst of the American political system. I was a guy who was drawn to politics because of campaigns and not government. Stuart Stevens © 2020 Kwiple.com
Selfie  I'm not interested in waiting four decades for the day when women don't pay a penalty for being a woman. Elizabeth Warren, Persist  [2021] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Technology Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, reckons that an alarmingly different kind of Moore’s Law is at work today: the minimum IQ needed to destroy the world drops by one point every 18 months. John Thornhill, Financial Times, May 13, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye Liz Cheney Madison Cawthorn, 9:33 AM – May 12, 2021, Repubican representing North Carolina's 11th congressional district, on Liz Cheney's ouster from her Republican Party leadership position for refusing to spread Trump's Big Lie © 2021 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say There is one peron that changes this climate in this country and that is God. OK? Tommy Tuberville (renowned, but not for climate science) © 2021 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say This is the fucking American Dream she is shitting on. Leon Cooperman, billionaire convicted of insider trading, responding to Elizabeth Warren's proposed two/three cent wealth tax on every dollar over $50 million/$1 billion in wealth © 2021 Kwiple.com
 
Wealth inequality When economists measure inequality, the most common number they use is called the Gini coefficient, which captures the dispersion of income for households from zero (completely equal) to one (completely unequal). Based on their social tables, [Peter] Lindert and [Jeffrey] Williamson were able to construct a Gini coefficient for early America. In 1774, the Gini coefficient for American households, including slaves, was .441. It was .409 without slaves. To put that into perspective, the Gini coefficient for America in 2012 was .463. What that means is that America in 2012 was actually more unequal than the America of 1774 — even including slavery. Ganesh Sitaraman, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution © 2021 Kwiple.com