Today In Tabs is the odd and idiosyncratic blog of Rusty Foster, and if it has any single theme it’s probably a critique of modern journalism. And it’s good at that. But it’s also full of his personal ruminations on…
Democracy: It’s A Goal, Not A Destination
One of the big problems with democracy is that it’s reeeaallly sloooow at any significant scale. It takes a long time for millions of votes to be collected and counted. This limits how many questions can effectively be dealt with…
Build Back Smaller: The United States Was Too Big
Well, ok. It wasn’t too big to occasionally be useful, or too big to kinda function. At least for a while. But the U.S. was too big to stay unified. 350 million people, with the level of communication technology we…
The C-Word: Getting All Dramatic For The 4th Of July
I’ve been using the C-word a lot since January. For good reason. As I said at that link: “Taking direct control over the functions of the State without legal authority is a coup.” That was in reference to Musk and…
Enabling Fascism: The Supreme Court Targets Judicial Review
I mentioned this earlier, but hadn’t done a whole post about it yet because, well, we apparently live in a world where the Supreme Court ordering the end of meaningful judicial review by any lower courts isn’t the main story?…
Version Control: Every Word Of Every Law Should Be Tracked
I’ve brought this up before. Proposed legislation should be tracked with version control. As I said in that earlier piece: See, as it stands now it’s not uncommon for a law to be passed with no one able to say…
Complicity: Fiddling Around While America Burns
“Killed By A Big Beautiful Bill”. What a stupid line to have to to put on a country’s tombstone. Many, many commentators from the reality-based community have pointed out the many, many terrible things this legislation will do if it…
The Old Dog Needs Some New Tricks: Learning From The Laboratories Of Democracy
Every democracy that changes its rules is an experiment; each democracy that differs from the others is an experiment. All democracies are the laboratories of democracy. And the United States has failed to learn from them. Mostly, that’s just age:…
Mission Creeps: The California National Guard Is Working For The DEA Now
So, apparently the regime has found another use for a federalized California National Guard, other than jackbooting around Los Angeles with their rifles hanging out. So, now they’re off to Coachella. Valley, that is. Working for the DEA. Who, as…
Authoritarians United: The Military Is Socialized To Obey
Back in March, when the serious coup-ing kicked off, I wrote two of these short posts to point out that the police and the courts were unreliable opponents of a coup: Those have both gone pretty much as expected. Now,…