Articles written by thomas l knapp
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Nuclear Arms Reduction: Actions Speak Louder Than Words
On June 16, US president Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin issued a Joint Statement on Strategic Stability, in which they "reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought" and "seek to lay the groundwork...
America Unchurched: A Sign of the Times
For the first time in its more than eight decades of surveying Americans' religious attitudes and practices, Gallup reports, church members constituted only 47% of the US population in 2020 -- down 23% since 1999, prior to which the percentage...
Capitol Riot: Well Past Its Sell By Date
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Rahm Emanuel said in November 2008, shortly before becoming White House Chief of Staff in the Obama administration. Left unsaid: Even if you have to make something into a "serious crisis,"...
Robinhood: Stealing from the Poor to Give to the Rich
In late January, a band of merry men (and women) organized via Reddit and other Internet forums to stick it to The Man. They began buying shares of failing retail chain GameStop to drive its stock price up. Their target: Wall Street hedge funds engag...
Political "Unity" is Neither Necessary Nor Desirable
"[T]o restore the soul and to secure the future of America," President Joe Biden said in his inaugural speech, "requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity. ... This is our historic moment of crisis and...
Political Violence: The Politicians Doth Protest Too Much
On January 7, the day after rioters entered the US Capitol and put hundreds of politicians to flight in support of Donald Trump's election fraud claims, Wisconsins's State Assembly passed a resolution. The money line: "[P]olitical violence in any for...
Why Not Take Congressional Proxy Voting All the Way?
The Hill reports that US House Republicans, who made a show earlier this year of opposing remote and proxy voting in Congress, are warming to the latter practice. US Representative Paul Mitchell (R-MI) gave his proxy to US Representative Abigail Span...
Welfare for the Wealthier? What Else is New?
In Joe Biden's "Emergency Action Plan to Save the Economy," the president-elect proposes to "[f]orgive a minimum of $10,000 per person of federal student loans." Wait, some protest. That would be a subsidy for the more well-off, at the expense of...
American in Transition: What's the Hurry?
A November 23 headline at ABC News reads: "Joe Biden's presidential transition allowed to proceed after 16-day standoff." The 16 days in question, ABC tells us, are the 16 days since Biden "clinched the presidency." "Clinched the presidency" is ABC...
Mask Mandates: COVID-19 and the Law of the Instrument
"One day after the state reported a record 92 COVID-19-related deaths," the Wisconsin State Journal‘s Mitchell Schmidt reports, "Gov. Tony Evers announced Wednesday he plans to extend the state's emergency declaration and accompanying mask mandate t...
COVID-19: Two Things About "The Science"
On October 4, three scientists published "The Great Barrington Declaration," a statement named for the Massachusetts town in which they met. Infectious disease epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, professor of medicine Jay...
Facebook's Violence Standards Make for a Bad Business Plan
"Facebook Employees Are Outraged At Mark Zuckerberg's Explanations Of How It Handled The Kenosha Violence," reads the headline at Buzzfeed. One such employee asks "[a]t what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread...
The "Election Interference" Fearmongers Think You're Stupid
Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei prefer Joe Biden to Donald Trump. Vladimir Putin prefers Donald Trump to Joe Biden. That's according to William Evanina, Director of the US National Counterintelligence and Security Center. "Many foreign actors," he says,...
CARES Act: Prelude to a $15 Minimum Wage?
Included in the March 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act were three programs with less euphonious acronyms: FPUC, PEUC, and PUA. These programs extended (by 13 weeks), expanded (to self-employed workers), and added a $600...
The Road to Hell is Paved with Economic Plans
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says he has an economic plan for America to "Build Back Better." US president Donald Trump complains that Biden "plagiarized" significant elements of that plan from, you guessed it, Donald Trump. Both...
School's Out. Reactionaries Hate That.
If there's been one bright spot in America's COVID-19 experience, it's the near-complete shutdown of an expensive and obsolete government education system cribbed from mid-19th century Prussia. Across the country, "public" pre-K thru 12th-grade...
Quorum Call: Don't Expect the Constitution to Stop Pelosi's House Hijinks
In mid-May, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution authorizing remote voting by proxy. Per the resolution, one congressperson may vote on behalf of up to ten others. In theory, as few as 40 of the House's 435 members could show up in...
The Banality of Evil, COVID-19 Edition
As the COVID-19 pandemic ran its deadly course in New York, governor Andrew Cuomo affirmed a state policy forbidding nursing homes to reject suffering from the disease. At least partially as a result (Cuomo himself acknowledged early on that the viru...
No, the Politicians Didn't Save Us from COVID-19
Writing at Reason magazine, Eric Boehm notes two trends revealed in data released by Apple and Foursquare. Trend One: Americans began reducing their outings and social interactions before, not because of, "shelter in place" orders issued by...
Concern Troll is Concerned, Elbe Day Edition
On April 25, 2020, US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement commemorating the 75th anniversary of "Elbe Day" -- the day, presaging the end of World War 2 in Europe, when Russian and US troops met near...
After the Pandemic: Back to School, or Forward to a Better Future?
Anyone who tries to tell you that the COVID-19 pandemic, and its associated social, political, and economic panics, are good things is an idiot, or trying to sell you some kind of snake oil, or both. Society-wide disasters are always net negatives,...
Yes, Trump Should Talk with the Taliban
On March 3, US president Donald Trump spoke (via telephone) with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, chief of the Taliban's Doha diplomatic office and signer, on behalf of his organization, of the recently concluded Afghanistan "peace deal." "The direct...
Real Democracy Requires a Separation of Money and State
As we enter a new year, the running battle between the world's governments and the world-changing technology known as "cryptocurrency" continues. As 2019 drew to an end, Swiss president Ueli Maurer asserted that Facebook's digital currency (not a...
Holiday Consumerism: Who Decides What "Nobody Really Needs?"
"Wasting resources, capital and income on stuff nobody really needs," Charles Hugh Smith wrote in 2017, "is a monumental disaster on multiple fronts. Rather than establish incentives to conserve and invest wisely, our system glorifies waste and the d...
Want Lower Drug Prices? Make the FDA's Authority Advisory, Not Regulatory
Americans pay more for our prescription drugs than other people do -- half again as much as Canadians or Germans, more than twice as much as Greeks or Italians. In recent years, those costs have become a major issue in the political debate over...
