A stunning story in Wall Street Journal on May 26, 2020 reported that an internal study by Facebook’s own researchers in 2018 revealed that the social media company’s algorithms not only did not bring people together, but in fact were driving people apart. “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a…
“The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.” — Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823
“Police officers don’t face justice more often for a variety of reasons — from powerful police unions to the blue wall of silence to cowardly prosecutors to reluctant juries. But it is the Supreme Court that has enabled a culture of violence and abuse by eviscerating a vital civil rights law to provide police officers…
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” The White Queen to Alice, Alice in Wonderland
Below is an article from today’s The New York Times by Shira Ovide who writes the On Tech column for them. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Facebook had studied for two years whether its social network makes people more polarized. Researchers concluded that it does, and recommended changes to the…
“The decades of economic injustice and immense concentrations of wealth that we call the Gilded Age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live. That knowledge empowered them to bring the Gilded Age to an end, wielding the armaments of progressive legislation and the New Deal. Even now, when we recall the…
Below are two infographics from a September, 2019 PEW Research Center poll that shows how Americans feel about citizen inequality in the U.S. Majorities of Republicans and Democrats who say reducing inequality should be a top priority also point to inequality giving the wealthy too much political influence and access and being harmful…
While more people are out of work now than at any time since the Great Depression, COVID-19 ravages through the country, and middle class folks are lining up in their cars at food banks, the following news items caught my attention. I came across this article again recently: These 91 companies paid no federal taxes…
I was recently re-reading The Art of Questioning: Thirty Maxims of Cross-Examination by Peter Megargee Brown, former President of the Federal Bar Council and Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. (It’s an old book, published in 1987. I bought it on 29 January 1992 while I was working on my novel An…
Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n. 1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modifications; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism…