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Remember Sarah Beckstrom
Sarah Beckstrom was a National Guard member from Summersville, West Virginia. She died from bullet wounds while deployed to Washington, D.C. “She swore an oath to defend the Constitution. Donald Trump violated it to put her there. She should never have been deployed at all. A federal judge ruled last week that Trump’s activation of the National… Continue reading
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Thatcher and Reagan
You can trace a lot of the mess the world is in today back to two supervillains decades ago: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Calling them both supervillains may be slightly overstating things. In Reagan’s case, it’s quite possible that he just continued his acting career, as a politician, by repeating lines scripted for him.… Continue reading
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Think about this
The orange baby’s administration is zeroing out the ability of the US government to compete with the rest of the world — including actual enemies — in cybersecurity. To the extent this is explained at all, it’s attributed to commercial vendors wanting no oversight, and “MAGA loyalists don’t care because they aren’t interested in leadership… Continue reading
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Cruel, Stupid, or Both?
The Affordable Care Act has now been around for 15 years. It’s a very complicated combination that accommodates greed, human rights, and pragmatism. The greed it accommodates comes from the demands of the wealthy and powerful health insurance industry, which now believes it’s entitled to profit from misery because…well, because. I’m using “human rights” as… Continue reading
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I’ve visited Kansas…
…but I didn’t get the impression it was the sort of place where the Secretary of State would have to issue a public reminder to a newspaper that it wasn’t Election Day in the state, or that Kansans can’t vote in elections in other states. Continue reading
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Speaking of facts…
There is a style of mental activity (I hesitate to call it “thought”) that seems obviously to be in the ascendance lately. It features espousing a position, opinion, or belief that’s easily demonstrated to be false — that is, in opposition to what anyone can perceive — and yet “doubling down” on that nonsense even… Continue reading
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Best quote from a republic ever
Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house and a leader in the republic party, just drooled this out:“Don’t get lost in the facts.” The great aspiration of the US has always been that people would be rational, honest actors. That’s clearly gone, at least among the republics. Continue reading
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A bill of goods
“We’ve been sold a bill of goods in this country that we’re divided. We’re divided by gender, we’re divided by race, we’re divided by who we love, we’re divided by where we worship or whether we worship at all. And now they’re trying to tell us that we’re divided by Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Let… Continue reading
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Symiliptic report tober 28
The many discussions and thoughts that went into creating the sixth republic often involved citizenship. Many of us had concluded that it was citizenship that most contributed to the fall of the fourth republic. The idea of citizenship, and how it was assumed to be a thing that was conferred either by birth or by… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my newsletter, Artisanal Scribbles, where I’m grappling with writing, authentic human authorship, integrity, and the craft of beauty in the AI age. You can also find some of my old software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly wrote tiny utilities in Python and shell scripts. I’m mostly retired from coding nowadays.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
Recent Posts
- Where does power reside
- Can’t keep a secret?
- Look to the rigging
- Ocean’s 128GB
- How much is that doggie in the window?
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