Recent kwiples

Thursday 16th of May 2024

Kwiple.com Available without prescription™ © 2015 Kwiple.com
2022 midterm elections Roughly half the Republicans running for federal or statewide office believe the presidency was stolen from Donald Trump in 2020. That means America’s system itself is on the ballot next Tuesday. Edward Luce, Financial Times, November 2, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Authoritarianism Smart despots are interested in smart power. John Keane, The New Despotism © 2022 Kwiple.com
Criminal investigations The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.  Either approach would be a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts' involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of- powers limitations. Accordingly, we agree with the government that the district court improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction, and that dismissal of the entire proceeding is required. From the Court of Appeals For the 11th Circuit's decision to end special counsel review of documents seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago © 2022 Kwiple.com
Criminal investigations This appeal requires us to consider whether the district court had jurisdiction to block the United States from using lawfully seized records in a criminal investigation. The answer is no. … The district court improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction in this case. For that reason, we VACATE the September 5 order on appeal and REMAND with instructions for the district court to DISMISS the underlying civil action. Beginning and ending of Court of Appeals For  the 11th Circuit's decision to end special counsel review of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago © 2022 Kwiple.com
Global warming Climate change isn't a problem that can be solved by summoning the “will.” It isn't a problem that can be “fixed” or “conquered,” though these words are often used. It isn't going to have a happy ending, or a win-win ending, or, on a human timescale, any ending at all. Whatever we might want to believe about our future, there are limits, and we are up against them. Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Global warming In 2016, the United Nations High Com- missioner for Refugees estimated that, globally, an average of twenty-one million people were being displaced by weather- related events every year. The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration has projected that by 2050 as many as a billion people may be on the move. In the coming decades, “huge populations will need to seek new homes,” Gaia Vince, a British journalist, has written. Either “you will be among them, or you will be receiving them.” Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Global warming In early July [2022], at a time when much of the country was baking in ninety-five-degree-plus heat, the [New York] Times took a poll of registered voters. Asked to name the most important problem facing the nation, twenty per cent of the respondents said the economy, fifteen per cent said inflation, and eleven per cent said partisan divisions. Only one per cent said climate change. Among registered Republicans, the figure was zero per cent. Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Global warming In the past thirty years, humans have added as much CO2 to the atmosphere as they did in the previous thirty thousand. … In the words of the Stern Review, a report commissioned by the British government in 2005, climate change “is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.” Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Global warming To put this in terms of power, Americans are consuming roughly eleven thousand watts every moment of every day. A string of incandescent Christmas lights uses about forty watts. It's as if each of us had two hundred and seventy-five of these strings draped around our homes, burning 24/7. … This means that an American household of four is responsible for the same emissions as sixteen Argentineans, six hundred Ugandans, or a Somali village of sixteen hundred. Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Income inequality I am “just” upper middle class. But my life is one of late-Roman decadence next to that of the median earner. If you are a corporate lawyer (not even a partner) so is yours.  If you send your children to a private school, or live in the catchment area of an acclaimed state one, so, most likely, is yours. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 9, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Income inequality The inflection point on the economic scale comes much earlier than you think. Something dramatic happens between, say, £30,000 a year and £130,000: a sharper change in the texture of life than occurs between the second number and a million. The first jump affects what you can do. The second tends to affect merely how.  The upper middle class can rent in nice districts of world-class cities. The rich can buy there. The average can do neither. The upper middle class can fly to another continent. The rich can fly business. The average must plan and econo- mise to do either. Having passed through the same universities, the upper middle class and the rich are often of a cultural feather. … How often does either befriend a nongraduate Band 5 NHS nurse? Or marry one? Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, Dec. 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
Marriage Marriage is nature's way of keeping us from fighting with strangers. Alan King © 2022 Kwiple.com
Money in politics Just as Republicans repay their donors with tax cuts, Democrats repay their base with debt forgiveness. Edward Luce, Financial Times, December 7, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics I have aired Ganesh's First Law of Politics before, but allow me a recapitulation. People do not work out their beliefs and then join the corresponding tribe.  They join a tribe and infer their beliefs from it.  The sense of belonging, the group membership, is what hooks people, not the thrill of being right or pursuing a thought on its own terms. Politics has become a team sport, goes the line on this. But even that is too kind. Sports fans are sardonic and irreverent about their own team. It isn’t so central to their identity as to require consistent adherence.   Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 2, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics A rudder, a bedrock, a cornerstone, a north star: people used to find  these things in their personal relationships. In their church, family, factory or town. As modernity scrambled those things, mostly for the good, the need to subsume oneself into a group was going to have to be met some other way. That turned out to be politics. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 2, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics We have lost all sense of how weird it is to seek connection with others through politics. And how new. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 2, 2022 © 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
Public lands Across America, 15 million acres of state and federal land lies surrounded by private land, with no legal entry by road or trail.  Most can be found scattered across the West,  moated by ranches and corporate buildings. Such “landlocked land,” if it were one contiguous piece, would form the largest national park in the country, an area nearly the size of Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut. New York Times, November 26, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Snapshot I looked into those blue eyes, and I might as well have been looking out the window. Dan Quayle portrayed by one of his professors at DePauw University © 2022 Kwiple.com
Snapshot You could walk through Ronald Reagan's deepest thoughts and not get your ankles wet. Ronald Reagan portrayed by a California legislator © 2022 Kwiple.com
Socio-economic mobility Immigrants are good at doing something difficult: leaving behind relatives, friends and the familiarity of home in search of prosperity. The economists found that native-born Americans who do what immigrants do — move toward opportunity — have children who are just as upwardly mobile as the children of immigrants. Peter Coy, New York Times, July 17, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
State of the union Separate ethnic identies are emerging: America as a white settler republic; America as a multicultural democracy. You can have one or the other. Both cannot survive except as distinct countries Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say I support and agree with the former President. Unprecedented fraud requires unprecedented cure. Paul Gosar, 12:26 PM – 7 Dec 2022, in a tweet accompanied by a screenshot of Trump's posting on his social media site in which he justified terminating rules, even those in the Constitution, to get him installed as president [Gosar later deleted this tweet] © 2022 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say Well, I see good things about Hitler.  Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler. … But this guy that invented highways, invented the very microphone that I use as a musician, you can't say out loud that this person ever did anything good and I’m done with that. I’m done with the classifications. We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time. They did good things too.  Kanye West, a.k.a. Ye, responding to Alex Jones,  who said “You’re not Hitler. You’re not a Nazi. You don’t deserve to be called that and demonized.” © 2022 Kwiple.com
Wannabe autocrats say So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION?  A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, Dec 03, 2022, 7:44 AM © 2022 Kwiple.com
 
War Not having to worry about the effects of wars — unless you enlist to fight in them — has nearly become a birthright of being American. Stephen Wertheim, New York Times, December 2, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com