This week, the Federal Trade Commission and 48 attorneys general unveiled blockbuster lawsuits accusing Facebook of crushing competition and calling for the tech giant to be broken up.
The twin complaints together run to nearly 200 pages documenting how Facebook became so powerful — and how, according to the government, it broke the law along the way.
In the South African House of Assembly, on 6 September 1966, Dimitri Tsafendas knifed to death Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd. Shortly after, Tsafendas was declared to be a schizophrenic who had no political motive for assassinating Verwoerd. Declared unfit to stand trial, Tsafendas went down in the history books as a deranged murderer. Harris Dousemetzis exposes one of the great lies in South African history and shows that Tsafendas was an extraordinary man, with deeply held communist and anti-racist politics.
A major cost of living in New York State is taxes. We have very high property taxes, but then again does much of New England. The median property tax bill in Albany County, NY is $4,200, while the median property tax bill in the mountain country of Webster County, WV is $268. In much of the south, especially away from the oceans and metropolitan areas, property taxes are much lower then in our area. You can understand why many people, especially seniors to choose to move to lower tax states.
Data Source: MORTGAGE STATUS BY AGGREGATE REAL ESTATE TAXES PAID (DOLLARS). Universe: Owner-occupied housing units, 2011-2015 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates. https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_15_5YR_B25090&prodType=table
The drug-fueled escapism of the Weimar years helped turn Berlin into what Alfred Dublin called the “Whore of Babylon,” while the collapse of the currency in 1923 contributed to the collapse of liberal and conservative institutions and values. For both Communists and Nazis, the impression of total dissolution offered an obvious target. The Nazis seized the opportunity to imply that Jews were behind every aspect of the Weimar Republic, which they called the “Jewish Republic.” Jews were equated with toxins, bacilli, and pathogens.
11/26/20 by NPR
In this special episode NPR’s Throughline explore the constitution with Heidi Schreck and her play, What the Constitution Means to Me. They discover what the document is really about – who wrote it, who it was for, who it protected and who it didn’t.
11/26/20 by Matt Brechwald
Happy Thanksgiving to all of you this year. 2020 has been unbelievable between the pandemic, the politics and the polarization of our society. I thought that it might do us all a little good to hear the original proclamation of thanksgiving by President George Washington to remind us where our priorities should be. I hope this strikes you the same way that it did me, and that you have peace at your table for this great, American, holiday.
While I am posting this about a week after Thanksgiving, I really like Matt Brechwald’s podcast and his observations as a farmer and small town police officer and landlord piecing together a life on his rural land.