The Books of Bokonon

One of my friends covered the bankruptcy filing of Big Lots! a couple months back and I would advise you look at his post and accompanying videos for more context. The news today is that the deal that would have saved at least some Big Lots! outlets had fallen through , and the company is days away from simply liquidating remaining inventory and closing all currently opened locations. I am well aware of my city's Big Lots! store. It is located in the same shopping center as the pharmacy I go to. There are some other discount outlets located at the same shopping center, including a Ross. I had expected that our city's Big Lots! would have been closed regardless, as that seems to be what often happens when a major change goes through bankruptcy. That said, the store always looked busy - at least based on parking lot traffic - so perhaps it would have survived reorganization. Barring a miracle, I guess we will never know. The retail apocalypse isn't quit my usual beat, but si...

According to the scripture found in the Books of Bokonon , a Pool-pah is defined as a "shit storm" or "the wrath of God." Either will do as far as I am concerned as we witness the latest round of House GOP incompetence (with a significant assist from Trump and shadow president Musk). As of now, we are staring down yet another government shutdown, and I will have to double check the calendar for the last day that the debt ceiling needs to be raised, but also the debt ceiling being breached, thus tanking the global economy. We have some real stable geniuses running this circus.  Here's the sitch: The US House of Representatives has a GOP majority this session that is wafer thin (currently 221 GOP - 214 Dem). It will be an even thinner majority come January when the new Congressional Session starts (220 GOP - 215 Dem, with some seats already vacated thus further narrowing the majority). Any House Speaker, regardless of who he or she is, will have to accept that mos...

It's been a minute since I put up another video in this series. If you have not ready On Tyranny , I would ask why not? It's a book that can be read in a single sitting and it's written by a professor who actually knows how to write like a regular person. You'll learn a lot along the way. Now on to our next video: This is a useful lesson. Find a cause or some causes that you value and contribute. Depending on your time and skill set, maybe you'll donate money. Maybe you can give some of your time. None of us can be everywhere at once. So we donate time when and where we can, and otherwise spare some change when we can.  I love the concept of civil society . I probably saw or heard the term civil society used around the late 1990s. I had no idea of its eastern European origins. Dr. Snyder can tell the story better than I can, so I hope you check out the video. Basically civil society includes various organizations (some political) made up of people who share some c...

Learned helplessness is not helpful, and the rationale for learned helplessness is not even based on reality . I would honestly be breathing a lot easier if Harris had won the White House and ideally the Democratic Party held the Senate and regained the House. That did not happen. Trump squeaked out a win in terms of popular vote and really had a so-so showing in terms of the electoral vote. To put things in perspective, Biden's performance in 2020 was also relatively speaking so-so, and aside from Obama in 2008, so-so victories are about all that we've seen this century when it comes to Presidential races. The US Senate ended up about how I was expecting it to go, and about the way that actual professional analysts had expected. A GOP mandate would have meant sweeping Senate seats in the same swing states Trump won. Aside from Pennsylvania, where Casey lost just barely, Trump proved to have no coattails. And if you paid attention to the polls, one thing that was consistent was...

Michael Moore has been right on the matter of health care for ages, and we should listen now . I think we can have a very candid conversation about the state of healthcare in the US without glorifying the dude who assassinated that United Healthcare insurance CEO last week (both of whom are villains in this story and both shall be unnamed here on this blog). We can acknowledge that assassinations are rarely "good" or "heroic" actions. It's murder. But then again, if we think about the role that insurance corporations play in denying care to average working folks like myself, we can ask how much blood on their hands these insurance companies as well as any of the other corporations that run our healthcare system, including hospital corporations and pharmaceutical corporations. There is such a thing as organizational violence, and that is violence where some bureaucratic action is systematically responsible for the harm to people who would not have been harmed oth...

I'll lead by posting a link to a blog post I think might be worth your while. The blogger I've known primarily as The Analyst on Telegram has been moving over to Bluesky and has hosted longer posts on his own blog.  The Analyst's title is certainly intended to provoke a reaction. The reality is that all governments fall eventually. It's never a matter of if but when. Towards the end, The Analyst makes clear that predicting the exact moment that this iteration of Russia led by Putin is impossible. But if one reads through the post carefully, one will appreciate the various economic and geopolitical headwinds the Putin regime faces.  The economic picture is grim. The ruble has been losing value for much of this year, and plunged recently to its lowest level since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Although the ruble recovered a bit, it is still north of 100 rubles to one US dollar, and there is little hope that aside from maybe another dead cat bou...