To the tens of thousands of other renters in our city of Lakewood, I would like to say: thank you.

Thank you, renters, for being literally the greater part of Lakewood. More than half of this community lives in rental housing, including me.

I have heard renters maligned, treated with suspicion, and referred to like we are a “foreign” presence here. Yet renters are actually the majority of the people around us, at the park or doing the grocery shopping, e.g.

Additionally, many of the absolute hands-down best people I have known during 11 years in Lakewood have rented their homes. People who improve this community as volunteers, leaders, activists, entrepreneurs. It would be a sadder and poorer city without these involved citizens here, demonstrating how much they care about their home: Lakewood.

So thank you Lakewood renters. Thank you for voting, paying taxes, raising families, supporting local businesses. Thank you for sharing and shaping the community we are all part of.

Thank you, renters, for being here.

The Senate is a terrible institution, intrinsically, but that’s really no more or less than we ever should have expected, given its origins.

I could write at length about the problems with the United States Senate, with its origins, and with the very concept of a senate. But lately I have been musing on one, somewhat ironic, feature of this institution which seems likely to preside over the wrecking of America (with characteristic pomp and puffery).

A quick search online supports my sense that the framers of America’s Constitution had the Roman Republic very explicitly in mind, and that the existence of America’s senate is thus the product of conscious reference to Rome, and its.

From the perspective of history, I submit, the notable feature of the Roman Republic is its takeover from within by a series of tyrants, never reversed right up through the collapse of the Roman state—despite the continued existence of the Roman Senate throughout.

The Framers’ big model for thinking about how a republic could work, in other words, fell to autocrats who found a senate to be no obstacle, and in some ways even a very willing partner to autocracy.

I will just give this its own post, here. Thanks for sharing this keen observation, Brooke Harrington.

…though the global network of offshore tax havens is a relatively recent tool for billionaires to advance their interests, the impulse driving the sponsors of populist movements is not. The novelist GK Chesterton had their number over a century ago, when he wrote: “The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea on his yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.”

‘Aristocrats are anarchists’: why the wealthy back Trump and Brexit
Brooke Harrington