Idiotprogrammer: Texas Literary Blog

Category: Right and Wrong

  • Ordinary people complain about the IRS (and Trump)

    I am a New York Times junkie (I received a discounted rate which has never expired). The articles are first rate, but sometimes the reader comments are more interesting than the actual articles. After NYT published its shocking investigative report about the Trump family’s $400 million tax fraud (summarized here), I found the comments harrowing to…

  • Cornyn: “We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters and name-calling by the mob.”

    Cornyn: “We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters and name-calling by the mob.”

    Dear Senator Cornyn, Friday, you said on the floor of the US Senate: “We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters and name-calling by the mob.” To my knowledge, it is not illegal for people to be paid to protest. I know that lobbyists are paid to make their opinion known to you.…

  • REVIEW: Netflix Documentary “Making a Murder”

    (A few months ago I wrote this response to the Netflix documentary, Making a Murderer and forgot to post it). Some random thoughts: Family members were the stars of this series. We saw so much of them! They were strange to look at, and not particularly interesting. Like mole people. Nice but dull. The series…

  • Guns and more guns to the rescue! (Guns in movies and real life) By Robert Nagle

    TX blogger (and crime victim) Robert Nagle tries to understand people’s fascination and romanticization of guns in cinema and real life.

  • The flaw of libertarian economics

    The flaw of libertarian economics is that it overlooks or discounts the predatory aspects of power. You can say that we should get government off our backs or that taxation is an unjust burden or that the free market provides an optimal creation of wealth. But without oversight or interference, more powerful businesses can easily …

  • “Perrycare” defined

    For better or worse, the Affordable Care Act (the new health care reform law) has been dubbed “Obamacare.” Here’s  another neologism: Perrycare.  It is  is defined as health care inside a state which has refused Medicaid expansion despite generous financial incentives to do so. It is characterized by skyrocketing health care premiums and overall costs…

  • Professional Ethics (My Most Expensive Blog Post Ever!)

    I am linking to it casually (and making only superficial comments), but this  professional code of ethics I have developed about working for the energy industry is one of my most important (and most expensive personally).  I live in Houston, which is basically the center of many energy companies, most of which deal with fossil…

  • Chron.com’s lack of coverage of hunger strikers is truly shocking

    Progressives in Texas may already know about how Houston climate change activists are protesting the XL Keystone Pipeline with a hunger strike. But do most Houstonians know? A hunger strike is a blatant attempt to manipulate public opinion by staging a public act of self-denial. The thinking goes, if the activist demonstrates that his willpower…

  • Surgical Strikes are not surgical and are not precise

    Matt Duss scolds the New York Times for this bellicose editorial advocating Iranian bombing. He notes this passage: Incentives and sanctions will not work, but air strikes could degrade and deter Iran’s bomb program at relatively little cost or risk, and therefore are worth a try. They should be precision attacks, aimed only at nuclear…

  • Attention Larry King, Attention US publishers!

    Glen Greenwald deconstructs a New York Times piece on the wrongful Gitmo imprisonment of a Sudanese journalist. Greenwald writes: By stark contrast, the American public is, as Stelter notes, almost completely ignorant of what our government has done in this regard.  And why is that?  Because the same media that fixates endlessly on the imprisonment…

  • Martha Nussbaum: Intimacy is not a fusion but a conversation

    Here’s a great mp3 by Martha Nussbaum on desire, passions and Hellenistic philosophy.  An excerpt from the transcript (same link): Interviewer: There’s an Epicurean doctrine regarding death which finds perhaps its fullest exposition in Latin in the work of Lucretius. It goes like this, ‘It is irrational to fear that which we will not experience,…

  • Innocent men should not be executed; guilty governors should be impeached

    I am definitely late to this story, but David Grann’s article about the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham suggests how an inadequate justice system cannot be trusted with putting people to death. Now it appears that Rick Perry has failed to reappoint some key officials on a science review panel, derailing their report until after…

  • Health care reform and medical bankruptcy: Answering the Libertarian Argument

    Nicholas Kristof on how a system based on private health insurance frequently results in spouse impoverishment, sometimes leading to fake divorces. Here are reader comments about the article which turn out to be more interesting than the original article. This argument has not frequently been cited, but it shows how the health care debate has…

  • Health Insurance and Amenable Mortality

    Here’s an article by Ellen Norte and C. Martin McKee that tries to compare mortality rates for incidents which might be prevented by health care intervention: The concept of amenable mortality was developed in the 1970s to assess the quality and performance of health systems and to track changes over time. For this study, the…

  • “There is just nothing left of her.”

    Karen de Sa reports a heartbreaking story of parental abuse and murder. The criminal father of a young girl received full custody during a divorce and ended up killing her. The method was particularly nefarious. Not only did he sexually abuse her, but he told everyone that the girl had run away.  The mother disagreed…

  • Anti-abortionism is easy; why not have a opinion requiring real moral courage?

    About 15 years ago I was active in my Catholic church on social issues. I served on AIDS care teams, a homeless shelter and issue advocacy.  One thing I did was to start a petition drive at my church to support universal health care.  It was an issue where  Catholic views of charity coincided with…