Recent kwiples

Monday 6th of May 2024

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2020 Presidential election  This was a coup organized by the President against the Vice President and against the Congress in order to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It was what political scientists call a “self-coup” because it's not the military or  some other faction attacking the president. It's the president, fearful of defeat, overthrowing the constitutional process. Trump was prepared to seize the presidency and likely to invoke the Insurracion Act and to declare martial law. … There was a violent insurrection and an attempted coup and we were saved by Mike Pence's refusal to go along with that plan and by the valor and bravery of our officers who stood strong against the attempt to just overrun the process. Jamie Raskin, April 18, 2022, on Jan. 6, 2021 © 2022 Kwiple.com
2020 Presidential election Next time we'll come back with rifles. And that’s not an idle threat. A Trump supporter carrying a wooden bat who was barricaded by DC police away from the Capitol building near the Reflecting Pool, quoted in Washington Post, January 7, 2021 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Car culture The worst-kept secret in Motown is a forthcoming long-wheelbase version [of  the Jeep Grand Wagoneer] to compete with Suburban, Navigator I, and Escalade ESV. Good news, equestrians, now your horse doesn't have to ride in the trailer. Dan Neil, Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus Wearing a mask cleans nothing. At most it traps virus droplets. But it neither ‘sanitizes’ the person wearing the mask nor ‘sanitizes’ the conveyance. US District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, former law clerk for the ethically-challenged Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,  who Trump appointed District Judge after losing  the 2020 election despite her never having been  a lead or co-counsel in a civil or criminal case and her having been rated “Not Qualified” by the  American Bar Association, and who cancelled oral arguments before writing her 59-page decision  that invalidates the government-imposed mask mandate on public transportation nationwide and invites suits to prohibit the CDC from ever again issuing public health mandates  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Democracy It couldn’t be more simple. A vote for Republicans is a vote to destroy Democracy. Rob Reiner, 8:03 AM – Apr 20, 2022, on the Republicans during the Trump era © 2022 Kwiple.com
Economic growth U.S. economic leadership came from mass education, not from a small elite of billionaires. They have never been the source of U.S. prosperity, and they will never be. Thomas Piketty, New York Times, April 1, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Freedom of speech If we ask not who is ashamed to speak but who is stigmatized for speech, it is easier to diagnose what is a crisis and what is fearmongering. Tressie McMillan Cottom, New York Times, April 12, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Gerrymandering But just because soemthing is unjust and incompatible with democratic principles and fiendishly effective, Justice Roberts writes [in Rucha v. Common Cause], doesn't mean it's within the purview of the court to find a constitutional violation. Gerrymandering stinks, but not so badly that the Constitution can smell it. Jordan Ellenberg, Shape © 2022 Kwiple.com
Healthcare Now, the effects of Covid and the promise of more federal spending on health are fuelling investor interest in areas such as psychiatry practices, home healthcare and even hospice care. Dangers lie ahead. “Think about how private equity will make money in something like hospice,” says [Eileen] Appelbaum [of the Center for Economic and Policy Research]. “They'll cut the seasoned staff trained to help families understand and cope with the process of dying, and hire people who might be able to help clean the house.” Welcome to healthcare, American style. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, April 10, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Higher education According to four decades worth of data analysed by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, 60 per cent of college students earn more  than a high school graduate after 10 years — but that means 40 per cent do not. And at a third of those institutions, more than half of students earn less than high school graduates after a decade. Financial Times, April 4, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Immigration Late last year, the US Census Bureau said international immigration into the US was at its lowest in decades. Net international migration had added 247,000 people to the population between 2020 and 2021, the bureau said, compared with a high of more than 1m between 2015 and 2016,  and lower than the net inflow of 477,000 people added between 2019 and 2020. … Immigration into the country was already in decline before the onset of the pandemic. The number of visas issued by the state department's overseas posts fell 25 per cent between 2016 and 2019. Between 2016 and 2020, the number of visas issued fell by more than 60 per cent. Financial Times, April 9, 2022 © 2022 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
Liars say I don't know. Vern Buchanan, Republican representing Florida's 16th congressional district, explaining why he voted against a bill he co-sponsored to name a Florida courthouse after Joseph Hatchett, the first black Florida supreme court justice and first black state supreme court justice south of the Mason-Dixon line, following the circulation of a letter opposing the honor by Georgia representative Andrew Clyde — who's agaist the Emmett Till Anti- Lynching Act and recognizing Juneteenth as a federal holiday and called the January 6 insurrection a “normal tourist visit” — because Hatchett upheld the Supreme Court's ban on school prayer in a 1999 decision, leading to killing the bill © 2022 Kwiple.com
Math Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve its sales. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time © 2022 Kwiple.com
Nationalism Today’s far right and far left share an outlook: hatred of one’s own nation, at least in its current incarnation, and the search for a better foreign country to love. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, April 13, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Oligarchs Today — in a moment when the Russian invasion of Ukraine has  turned the spotlight on Russian oligarchs — he [Benjamin Page] says: “The evidence has piled up in such a way that it's maybe not unreasonable to call some of America’s wealthiest people oligarchs. I think that's the way I’d put it.” He pauses. “Lots of evidence.” Jaime Lowe, New York Times Magazine, April 7, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Political inequality History has dehypotheticalized Hamilton's angry worry [in Federalist #22 about the potential for minority rule]; the twenty-six smallest states, whose fifty-two representatives make up a majority in the Senate, speak for just 18% of the population. Jordan Ellenberg, Shape [2021] © 2022 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
Punt returners say It's a noun. So is “idiot”. @FPWellman, 8:11 PM – May 25, 2021, responding to My pronoun is “Patriot”. @laurenboebert, 4:59 PM – May 25, 2021 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Reading A person who won't read  has no advantage over one who can't read. Maxim — and similarly worded maxims — often attributed to Mark Twain, but without evidence © 2022 Kwiple.com
Republican Party motto Heads we win. Tails we coup.  citation Slogan for the Trumpist Republican Party suggested by Bill Maher, April 22, 2022, Real Time with Bill Maher © 2022 Kwiple.com
Snapshot I guess, in a way, my mother was an asshole. His mother portrayed by John Cleese © 2022 Kwiple.com
Snapshot He was able to get elected on an ideology where you don’t redistribute between the rich and the poor but rather you protect Americans, especially white male Ameri- cans, against anybody who looks foreign. The risk is that neoliberalism is replaced by this form of neo-nationalism in order to avoid redistribution. Donald Trump portrayed by Thomas Piketty, New York Times, April 1, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
State of the union Donald Trump has always benefited from the inability to imagine Donald Trump. It was unimaginable that a man who talked in public about having sex with his daughter would be the Republican nominee for president or that he would win. It was unimaginable to me that Republican Senators and elected officials would not concede an election that wasn't even close. North of 300 electoral votes, eight million more votes, but that's what happened. Stuart Stevens, April 20, 2022, once a Republican campaign adviser © 2022 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say I think the American people are fed up with this over-dramatization of a riot that happened here at the Capitol one time. … They are sick and tired of January 6. It's over. OK? Marjorie Taylor Greene, April 11, 2022 [By “over-dramatization” she means the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol] © 2022 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say The policies that I represent are the policies that are represented by Mr. Trump. They're represented by Mr. Putin. Marie Le Pen © 2022 Kwiple.com
 
Ukraine All of these discordant notes [China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Marie LePen and far right in France, etc.] underline that any initial impression that the whole world had united in outrage against Russia was clearly misleading. Instead there is an “axis of outrage” centred on the western alliance and an “axis of indifference” centred on the Global South. Gideon Rachman, Financial Times, April 15, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com