A good bit of US history via the New York Times that I never learned in school. The first black US Senators were from Mississippi, just after the Civil War. Mississippi was, and remained for some time, majority black.

The Ghosts of Mississippi

A little Sitting Bull on this quiet Saturday morning. From his speech at an Indian council at the Powder River in 1877

Yet hear me, friends! We have now to deal with another people, small and feeble when our forefathers first met with them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not! They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They even take tithes of the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. – Sitting Bull

The first slave revolt in the New World occurred 500 years ago this month, on a Caribbean island run by a descendant of Christopher Columbus.

1521 Santo Domingo Slave Revolt

24 cognitive biases that are warping your perception of reality

Larger than home rooftop systems but smaller than utility-scale complexes, community solar systems a promising alternative

Texas famously has no state income tax. Business taxes are also famously low. So where does the state get its money? Property tax is largely the answer. While this sounds somewhat reasonable, it has two problems. The first is that it is very regressive. The richest people in Texas (and everywhere) tend to spend a much smaller proportion of their wealth on housing. In fact, a very wealthy person doesn’t have to live in an expensive house at all.

An even bigger problem for most people is that they don’t really own their house. They have a mortgage. So they are literally paying a tax on a debt. It is difficult to get figures but there is $10 trillion in mortgage debt in the US. So Texas, at least, is funded by a tax on middle class debt. Sounds a bit outrageous, and maybe it is.

So why can’t we tax other debts? One problem (well, I consider it a problem) is very wealthy Americans have untaxable assets, like stock, and are only able to operate tax-free by taking out loans against these assets. Like the assets, these loans aren’t taxed either. So the wealthiest Americans go along year after year, decade after decade, paying no tax. So why not tax their debt? We do it to the rest of America.

There’s an easy way to tax billionaires that would actually work

This is enough to make me consider getting a Twitter account.

Chipotle Ruins Thanksgiving For Everyone And More Of This Week’s ‘One Main Character’

We tend to watch HGTV and Food Network by default. Our favorite food show is Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (or “Triple D”). The ultimate TV version of comfort food. You always know what you are getting, and that isn’t a bad thing. From the Atlantic:

The Loss at the Heart of Guy Fieri’s Entertainment Empire

I continue my family photo archiving project. Tackled a box filled with old photos of me, mostly. Some interesting odds and ends. A set of Richard Nixon commemorative postage stamps, an old Disneyland ticket, a birthday card from the 1970s, unopened, containing a $5 bill, plus a collectable Danny Bonaduce Partridge Family card!

I read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements a very long time ago. I believe I heard my father mention it when I was very young and it got my attention. If you want to know how mass movements arise, or more correctly, are constructed, read this. Saw a blog post in my news feed discussing Hoffer and his True Believers. A good overview, but I still recommend the book.

True Believers