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

The Road to Hell is Paved with Screwed Over Black, Hispanic and Native American Kids (and They Deserve Better)

Its been my observation that a surprising amount of research education sucks, either focusing on irrelevant trivia or desperately avoiding logic and common sense at all costs. Every so often, though, you come across something well written and cogent. Here are the first two paragraphs of an article that comes close: Racial-, ethnic-, and language-minority […]

Pakistan Today, Here Tomorrow

I cannot speak for the credibility of the Asian Human Rights Commission, nor about this story they published entitled Pakistan: The last nail in the coffin of democracy. However, it does ring true to me based on other material I have read in Western media. To quote liberally, if not to lift wholesale: The year […]

Two Stories on Cause and Effect

Cause and effect leaves little room for how people want the world to work.  Here are two stories illustrating that. From Bloomberg: A Swiss maker of hamburger buns for McDonald’s Corp. said it’s struggling to run a Chicago bakery after it lost a third of its workers in a clampdown on 800 immigrants without sufficient […]

Healthcare Costs and Waste

Propublica has a story on waste in the medical industry: Experts estimate the U.S. health care system wastes $765 billion annually — about a quarter of all the money that’s spent. Of that, an estimated $210 billion goes to unnecessary or needlessly expensive care, according to a 2012 report by the National Academy of Medicine […]

The Future of Colleges & Universities… And the Present

This article looks at the future of colleges and universities: There are over 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States, but Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen says that half are bound for bankruptcy in the next few decades. Christensen is known for coining the theory of disruptive innovation in his 1997 book, “The […]

Crack v. Opioids and Violence v. Racism

Here’s is a PBS commentary by law professor Ekow Yankah: That Kroger, the Midwestern grocery chain, has decided to make the heroin overdose drug naloxone available without a prescription is a sign of how ominous the current epidemic has grown. Faced with a rising wave of addiction, misery, crime and death, our nation has linked […]

Baltimore School Test Scores and Baltimore School Spending

I’ve noted before I have a bit of an interest in Baltimore because my wife originates from there (despite having convinced herself that she’s from the Los Angeles area). So I noticed this story: An alarming discovery coming out of City Schools. Project Baltimore analyzed 2017 state testing data and found one-third of High Schools […]