The Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court Senate confirmation hearings reminds me a lot of another congressional hearing in the early 1990s. No, I’m not talking about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. I’m thinking of the testimony by the 15-year-old Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ in 1990, just prior to the United States first war in Iraq. To understand this […]
The Washington Post just reported that a friend of OJ Simpson believes he may be willing to confess to the 1994 murders after he is released from prison for unrelated crimes (possibly as early as 2017). Everyone who is old enough to remember 1994 has a story about OJ Simpson. Maybe they saw the infamous […]
In America today, a child can be charged with battery for throwing a piece of candy at a friend or threatened with expulsion for making a “gun” gesture with their index finger. They can also be imprisoned for cutting class and placed in solitary confinement or made to share a cell with hardened adult criminals. In […]
“One of the few good things about modern times,” Kurt Vonnegut observed, “If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.” Rarely a day goes by without another act of senseless violence occurring in the US. The motives seem to vary wildly: religious fanaticism, white supremacists trying […]
Today the Senate Intelligence Committee is set to release a report on the CIA’s use of torture in the years after 9-11, but the contents of the report are practically irrelevant since the decision not to punish those responsible makes it an exercise in historical archiving at best, nothing more. After his inauguration in 2009, President […]
We’ve done several exposés on the prison system in America, including The Prison System Runs Amok, Expands at Frightening Pace (Sept 6, 2012) and Selling the American Dream is the Biggest Market of All (Sept. 30, 2013), but there’s still much more to be said about this topic. America’s massive prison system is creating a long list […]
Yesterday, on the eve of the nation’s most celebrated spectacle, the Super Bowl, it was announced that actor Philip Seymour Hoffman had died from a heroine overdose, reportedly with the needle still in his arm. Of course, Hoffman is responsible for his own actions, especially given that he had numerous opportunities to benefit from rehab […]
In America, people believe that a house is who you are, while a car is who you want other people to think you are. If you have no house and you have no car, by extension you are nothing, and you want to be nothing. Many have modeled their lives around this belief, taking on […]
This article is a reprint, posted here with permission and for posterity. It’s by an anonymous author using the name Monty Pelerin. It is originally available at EconomicNoise.com. Hope is dying in the US. The performance of financial markets affects everyone. For savers and investors, these markets represent the means to an improved life, at least […]
In the early 1970s, the prison population in the United States was small and was steadily falling relative to the size of the population. Experts imagined that in a few decades, the prison system as we know it could be successfully dismantled, but that began to change after President Nixon began the War on Drugs in 1971, […]
