I was writing quite a bit in the lead up to last year’s election.

My numbers were juiced. The political environment was so fertile for interest that even mediocre writing or a deep dive into an esoteric topic put numbers on the board.

The election came and went, and something happened. Something changed.

My writing motivation waned. The solid numbers I was accustomed to putting up flatlined.

Even at the time, I knew it was not because of the quality of my writing. It couldn’t be. …

“Texas and Florida gain seats while California and New York lose them,” is how an instagram account for a right wing news site decided to interpret the census data.

Every ten years, the census counts the population (among other things). Growing states gain Congressional seats, while shrinking or stagnating states lose seats.

Here is a list of states that will gain a Congressional district:

Oregon

Montana

Colorado

Texas (2)

North Carolina

Florida

Here is a list of states that will lose a Congressional district:

California

Michigan

Illinois

Ohio

Pennsylvania

West Virginia

New York

Myth 1: Red states gained population/power while blue states lost population/power.

Let’s head back to that misleading headline: Texas and Florida gaining seats, New York and California losing them.

Of course, the underlying insinuation in that headline is that red states are…

On a conference call a few days ago, George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, acknowledged that Chinese vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates.”

Backtracking immediately, he tried to explain that he was attempting to increase vaccine efficiency. But his initial statement was actually quite accurate, as rare as it is for the Chinese Communist Party to admit any deficiencies.

Here are some of the Chinese vaccines currently on the market, along with their protection rates:

— Sinovac Biotech Ltd. with China National Biotec Group Co.’s vaccine is just over 50% effective

— Sinopharm Group Co.’s two vaccines are self-reported to be 73% and 79% effective, but there…

Let me start off with something controversial — I find Tucker interesting. While I often find myself disagreeing with him, I will at least give him credit that he is talking about ideas (mostly).

Unlike Hannity and Ingraham, who immerse themselves in the daily drab of blue team vs red team in an ever shrinking news cycle, Tucker has always fashioned himself a card carrying member of the right wing intelligentsia. Substance! Theory! Ideas!

One of Tucker’s recent theories has sparked some criticism. Here is the video, and I encourage everyone reading this to watch it in its entirety.

Joe Biden, heading into a tough election, cautioned American voters that the “GOP fever will break after the election.”

Except the year wasn’t 2020, it was 2012. I guess the fever never broke. Despite pushing broadly popular programs, President Biden has been met with near uniform resistance from Republican lawmakers.

Republicans have refused to negotiate in good faith with the Biden administration, while simultaneously slamming the president for failing to meet his campaign promise of uniting the country around bipartisan consensus.

I wanted to write a few ideas about bipartisanship in the present day — what it means, how to…

“Vita sine litteris mors est” — Life without learning is death. The authenticity of Seneca’s words, despite being written almost 2,000 years ago, is easily apparent. Letters From a Stoic (officially Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium) offers insight into living the moral life, free of distraction and temptation but full of meaning.

Seneca focuses on the mind over the soul. The soul, while technically a part of us, is not truly our own. Souls are not for people, but rather, are for the divine. As such, Seneca is more concerned with our minds and our ability to think rationally.

Wisdom, the…

You know the Trump era is over when Democrats and Republicans are yapping over issues like the federal debt and the annual deficit.

Welcome back! If Biden’s unofficial campaign slogan was Make Politics Boring Again, he was successful.

Debt and deficit talk is once again all the rage in America. Hell, even John Oliver is devoting a segment to it. Unfortunately, I’m seeing the same, widely held (and incorrect) assumptions about the debt being propagated by some in the media.

Let’s get into my views, of which some are heterodox.

1. Running up deficits is politically advantageous for the party in power.

(Short term, anyway.)

Take Jan Hatzius, the chief economist at…

The New York Times released a bombshell report detailing how the struggling Trump campaign deceived its donors, resulting in unprecedented amount of refunds and fraud complaints.

The Trump campaign quietly set the default donation option to recurring, forcing donors to “wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.”

According to the report,

As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. …