How to not create a democracy

Three things connect the Reign of Terror, Third Reich, Great Purge, and Great Leap Forward: 1. The people in power claimed they were helping the working class by targeting the “bourgeois”. 2. Their claim of who they were targeting was absolutely bullshit. Most of the people killed in these 4 events were impoverished. 3. Not …

Why We Aren’t Getting Any Stimulus

America’s retirement system is woefully inadequate for the majority of Americans. After paying 12.4% of their income into Social Security, the average American doesn’t have any money left over to save in an index fund. This means the majority of Americans both struggle in retirement and have no rainy day fund for if they lose …

Why we aren’t getting any stimulus

America’s retirement system is woefully inadequate for the majority of Americans. After paying 13.4% of their income into Social Security, the average American doesn’t have any money left over to save in an index fund. This means the majority of Americans both struggle in retirement and have no rainy day fund for if they lose …

Jen Perelman for Congress

On January 20, 2005 George W. Bush was sworn in for a second term. He had successfully eroded our civil liberties with the PATRIOT ACT, gotten us into an oil war with Iraq, and was already starting to rattle sabres with Iran. Virginian Terry McAuliffe was the chair of the DNC during this election. The …

These are the 10 things people don’t realize about elections

George Washington 1. First Past the Post comes with several major flaws. It creates the spoiler effect which means that with more than two candidates no candidate can win a majority, and this can lead to politicians getting elected who most of the voters oppose.2. The only system that is worse for people than First …

2020-2022 election analysis

So, there is a Wikipedia list which shows you the current political party strength in every state in these United States. I downloaded this into a Jupyter notebook today and did some Python magic on it this morning to start to understand what is really going on with the partisan spread in the United States. …

It’s the courts, Stupid!

Yesterday a bunch of Bernie Bros got Souter trending on Twitter, claiming that if Joe Biden is elected we will get a conservative Supreme court Justice. Let’s get some detail on that one: Nominee Year/President Vote Biden’s vote John Paul Stevens 1975, Ford 98-0 Yea Sandra Day O’Connor 1981, Reagan 99-0 Yea William Rehnquist 1986, …