Left Jabs

Today’s Republican party comes with an ambitious agenda. In no particular order, it seeks to ban books, ban abortion, ban discussions of race, rewrite history, corrupt elections, mandate guns, whitewash school curricula, gut the social safety net, trade the rule of law for theocracy, and marginalize, wherever possible, Black people, women, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, and anyone who’s not white, straight, Christian, and cruel. This is not a comprehensive list. And yet, with so much on their plate — with so much havoc still to be wreaked, so many barbarous laws to be written, so many marginalized groups to torment — they can still find time to demonize drag queens. That’s right. Forget the dying planet, the killer weather, the crumbling infrastructure. Drag queens are the real problem. There are currently bills moving through the legislatures of fourteen states that would, in one way or another, criminalize drag performance. On the surface, they’re aimed at raising the risks — b...

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills.                           -- Psychology Today   If you’re in the habit, as I am, of listening to Keith Olbermann’s daily Countdown podcast, you know of his “Worst Persons in the World” segment, and how he refers to those persons as “Dunning-Kruger effect specimens,” thereby raising the profile of a previously obscure, but compelling, phenomenon. We’ve all seen this ‘effect’ in action. We all know people with an inflated sense of their own talents. Perhaps we’ve even seen it in ourselves, on occasion, when we fall short in a “specific area” and cover our ignorance with bravado, assuming we’ll get away with it. But that’s eccentri...

There’s a hidden tax that every American is paying, and will probably keep paying well into the future. An organized crime tax, it's one consequence of the steep cost of global corruption on a monumental scale. Let’s call it the Putin Tax. Putin’s Russia is a mafia state, a kleptocracy from top to bottom. Russian organized crime is indistinguishable from the police, the judiciary, the military and the intelligence communities. They are all part of the same under-the-counter economic system, a system that runs on bribes, kickbacks, and all manner of extortion. This creates large-scale market inefficiencies, which in turn inflate the cost of virtually everything in its path — especially oil, gas, aluminum, and other “extractive” natural resources. The effects ripple upward through the global supply chain. Everyone in the racket kicks a share of the proceeds up to the next level, and with each kick upward, new costs are added to the final product, driving up prices at every leve...

It’s time for us to accept what the mainstream media refuses to acknowledge: that Donald Trump is a Russian asset and, as such, a grave security risk to the nation. Witting or not. Criminal or not. Whether he’s a master spy or a useful idiot, it doesn’t matter how he got there. Trump is a longtime front man, money launderer, and generally shady operator for both the criminal organizations and intelligence communities of eastern Europe. And while the details may never be fully revealed, the big picture couldn’t be clearer. This is neither supposition nor revelation. There is a rich and eye-popping literature of Trump corruption, chronicling his deep business ties to one mob boss or another, both here and abroad. Yet for some reason, the press goes out of its way to avoid the subject. We can only hope the justice system is more on top of it. Because there’s a mountain of evidence, and it goes back forty years. Whether that evidence rises to the level of crimina...