The tax fraud cometh

Republicans in Congress have released their tax proposals and to no one’s surprise, it is a massive redistribution of wealth from the have-nots to the oligarchy. Ed Burmila breaks down the awful details.

What does a massive tax-cutting bill so bad that even Republicans balk at it look like? Start with a staggering $1.5 trillion in tax cuts over ten years.

Sounds great, right? Well, you’re not getting any of it. It consists largely of corporate tax rate cuts – more on that in a second – and repealing the estate tax.
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The power situation in Puerto Rico is worse than reports suggest

For some time now, I have been reading reports that after hurricane Irma devastated that island nearly two months ago, only 30% of the island’s population have had power restored to them. That itself was scandalous and one can imagine the outrage if we were talking about (say) Florida or New Jersey or any other place where ‘real Merkins’ (i.e., white Christians) were the affected population, not Hispanic people.
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Note to readers regarding typos

As you know, you can preview a comment and edit out any errors but once you post a comment, you cannot make any further changes. If by any chance some typos or other error sneaks through and it is driving you crazy, you can send me an email (see the bio box on the left for the address) and I am willing to make the change on your behalf.

Another pathetic article about the existence of god and the soul

Reader Jeff ‘Hyphenman’ Hess takes one for the team and reads the neoconservative rag National Review so we don’t have to, and flags my attention to a recent article that deviates from their usual warmongering to present arguments for the existence of god and a soul. They start by saying that science is what gives evidence for the existence of souls, so you know right off the bat that this is going to be a doozy, and it does not disappoint.
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The plight of Appalachia

Like many urban elites, I have little or no understanding of the people of central Appalachia, a rural mountainous region that spans southwestern Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio, eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and western Virginia. News media accounts (especially during election season which seems to be the only time we pay attention to that region), passing through the occasional town on the way to somewhere else, and seeing films like Deliverance can give a highly misleading picture of the people there as not only poverty-stricken and poorly educated, but even willfully obtuse in acting against their own interests, and being easily seduced by Donald Trump’s bogus promises to bring back coal jobs and rejuvenate the region.
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The latest attack is a sign of weakness

The killing of eight people and the injuring of eleven on the streets of New York City by a man driving a truck has once again shown that in an open society, there is no lack of soft targets that can be attacked by anybody at all. We have to ask ourselves what purpose such attacks on ordinary people serve. One is of course to create fear among the population. But that has no strategic benefit and indeed has negative blowback.
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Rwanda’s aggressive attitude towards curbing plastic pollution

The negative impact of plastics in our environment is worse than we thought. Earlier alarms had been sounded about plastics concentrating in large areas in oceans, though one must be cautious about how one describes it and calling them ‘giant garbage patches’ is misleading as discussed by the NOAA Marine Debris Program’s Carey Morishige.
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