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About that ‘border crisis’
BY THOMAS L. KNAPP I’m seeing a lot of back and forth lately on whether or not there’s a “crisis” at the border, with greatly increased migration and limited ability on the part of law enforcement to respond. Personally, I don’t consider it a “crisis” at all. Immigration is just people moving from one place
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Terrible ideas + evil actions /= ‘mental illness’
BY THOMAS KNAPP “One problem I have with the whole ‘mental illness’ frame for talking about mass shooters,” Paul Campos writes at Lawyers, Guns & Money, “is that the ‘mental illness’ often appears to be garden variety authoritarian ethno-nationalist misogyny, with the misogyny being the really critical ideological lynchpin [sic].” Campos is riffing on reports
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2024: We can do better … or can we?
BY THOMAS L. KNAPP On April 25, US President Joe Biden announced his intention to seek reelection in 2024. “The question we’re facing,” Biden says in his announcement video, “is whether, in the years ahead, we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer.” “I know what I want the answer to be,”
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‘Free the Weed’ for more than medical and recreational use
BY THOMAS L. KNAPP “Now That Weed is Mostly Legal,” reads the headline to a piece by Aryn Baker at Time, “Hemp Should Be Booming. But It’s Not.” Why? Contra Baker’s claim that hemp is “a close cousin of marijuana” and not as useful as advertised, it IS marijuana – the same plant – and
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Lies, Damned Lies and George Santos
BY THOMAS L. KNAPP “Of course,” the late P.J. O’Rourke wrote in Parliament of Whores, by way of explaining why government is boring, “politicians don’t tell the truth. … But neither do politicians tell huge, entertaining whoppers: ‘Why, send yours truly to Capitol Hill, and I’ll ship the swag home in boxcar lots. … There’ll
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Yes, government is a business. No, you’re not the customer.
BY THOMAS L. KNAPP On Dec. 15, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report on the Internal Revenue Service’s failings in “providing customer service to taxpayers.” Are taxpayers “customers?” Let’s have a look at that idea. “For years, George Ochenski writes at CounterPunch, “we’ve all heard politicians claim they should ‘run government like a
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#leavingtwitter is tiresome performance art
BY THOMAS L. KNAPP Have you ever encountered a klansman at the grocery store? I have. I instantly recognized him as a member of the Ku Klux Klan because I’d seen him speak (sans hood) at a Klan rally (I was one of the protesters, not one of the klansmen) and on local TV repping
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Cryptocurrency: Don’t blame the medium for the scam
BY THOMAS L. KNAPP As cryptocurrency exchange FTX falls into bankruptcy and its principals seem likely to face various criminal charges over the activities leading to that bankruptcy, it’s time for another round of crowing from opponents (and would-be regulators) of cryptocurrency. Which means it’s time for another round of pointing out where those opponents
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Biden’s (Mild) Marijuana ‘October Surprise’: Good Start. More, Please.
BY THOMAS L. KNAPP After decades as one of America’s most vicious and uncompromising drug warriors — and three years of promising to become less vicious and more compromising — US president Joe Biden finally took action. On Oct. 6, he announced pardons for thousands of Americans convicted in federal court of “simple marijuana possession,”
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Does sparing the rod really spoil the child?
BY THOMAS L. KNAPP “When police found a kindergarten boy who had walked off from school after attacking his teacher and classmates,” Elizabeth K. Anthony writes at The Conversation, “it didn’t take them long to start guessing about the cause of his behavior.” Long story short: The cops concluded the boy wasn’t getting enough of
