Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Teach Your Children Well*

Appears that Parents’ Rights is the Republican Party’s latest wedge issue. My how they do love wedge issues. And, this one goes so well with their States Rights. Lot in common, the two. States’ Rights allowed a state to keep doing the same old. Parents’ Rights give parents the right to appropriate their child’s life. […]

Ponder This

If you will What if Jimmy Carter had been reelected in 1980; Walter Mondale had been elected in 1984 and reelected in 1988; and, Al Gore elected in 2000 and reelected in 2004? We would be at least twenty years ahead of where we are now in re Climate Change. Central America would not be […]

Somewhere

We are all somewhere on the spectrum. Little doubt. Probably not on the one-dimensional line of dots or Verne’s Green Ray (Le Rayon Vert). More likely on the two-dimensional Venn when a three is needed. A point in space is needed to depict those of us who are alone out there in space; else they […]

Ceci n’est pas une pipe

Death Valley is not experiencing a drought. Neither is the Mojave, the Sahara, nor the Gobi. A drought is an unusually extended period between the occurrence of a regularly occurring event; an anomaly. For example, when it usually rains on a regular basis, then but doesn’t rain for an unusually long period; that period during […]

How Close?

Justices Barrett, Alito, and Thomas have been panhandling. Begging for respect. Turns out that without respect; a Justice is nothing. All six imagined it to be right up there next to Moses, Joseph Smith and those guys; maybe even higher. Didn’t understand that any respect came down from their predecessors, from the legitimacy of their […]

By Any Other Name

Leaders like Lukashenko, Duterte, Erdoğan, Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Trump*; do they indeed represent a global move toward authoritarianism? Or, is there perhaps another explanation? Was there something specific that brought these once titular democracies to such a state of state; a common underlying reason for this lots rise to power? Did the world change, or, […]

Disinformation and the Manipulable

Politicians, preachers, and other charlatans have long known people were manipulable. They had achieved their mastery of the craft of manipulation by observation and practice. By craft, they were con artists. In another sense, they were psychologists before there was such. Before 1860, psychology was a branch of philosophy. A German, Wilhelm Wundt, was one […]

The Case of The Creeping Crud

In her 2020 book ‘Waste’, Catherine Flowers speaks to the practice in Alabama – throughout the South – of keeping the poor and ignorant poor and ignorant so that there would always be a cheap source of labor on hand. In a September 2021 House Budget Committee hearing, a member from neighboring Georgia patiently explained […]