Tag Archives: history

The Greater Good “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow Originally written in 2018 on the Save The Post Office blog and featured at Angry Bear in 2019, retired North Carolina Post Master Mark Jamison wrote on the issues facing USPS while in competition with Amazon, UPS, and FedX. The same issue has been brought to the forefront again with President Trump refusing to...

(Dan here…better late than not) by Barkley Rosser The 75th Anniversary Of VE Day: Forgettable Or Boring? My wife, Marina, as many of those reading this know, is from the Soviet Union, and takes extremely seriously the anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union and its allies over Nazi Germany, which became official at 10:45 PM in Berlin on May 8, 1945, which was 12:15 May 9 Moscow time. So, while all of the rest of the world celebrates VE Day on May...

Via Truthout is a reminder the US Supreme Court has rulings to make: On May 12, the Supreme Court will have an opportunity to rebuke or endorse Trump’s pretensions to monarchical grandeur when it hears oral arguments in three cases that have the potential to redefine the nature and scope of presidential power. The cases before the court are Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP; Trump v. Deutsche Bank AG; and Trump v. Vance. In the first two, the president is trying...

SCOTUS decided 8-1 in favor of health insurance companies and coops in MAINE COMMUNITY HEALTH OPTIONS v. UNITED STATES decision, April 27, 2020 to be paid. I have been following this issue since 2015 and SCOTUS finally ruled on Republican’s (Sessions, Upton, Kingston) blockage of the Risk Corridor Program funding. A bit of history to explain how we got to this point. Letter to the editor at Modern Healthcare Alert (2019): “If you are going to report on...

Towards a modern “History of Republics”: a consideration of William Everdell’s “The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans” In view of the horrific damage that the Trump Administration has done to the American Republic, during the past year I have done extensive reading of the histories of a number of the most successful or durable Republics over time. The reason has been to try to answer the question of whether there is an overarching...

In the last two weeks of March and the first week of April, 2020 16.5 million new claims for unemployment were filed in the U.S. After the novel coronavirus is successfully contained some but not all of those jobs will return. The post-pandemic economy will not be the same as the economy before and to assume a return to business-as-usual economic growth would be folly. There will need to be immediate share-the-work policies along with basic income...

In the context of history, the primary factors that shaped Western civilization are Judaeo-Christian religion, Greek thought, Roman organization and law, and modern science. The primary factors that shaped Chinese civilization are Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, with Marxism-Leninism being a blip on the screen. This is revealed in the differences in response to crisis. Asia TimesConfucius is winning the Covid-19 war Pepe Escobar

A thought for Sunday: a brief history of Republics anticipates Trump I just finished reading William R. Everdell’s “The End of KIngs: A History of Republics and Republicans,” which was originally published in 1983. It was interesting to read a book that treated Watergate as recent history! I want to write at more length about this book, but for now, consider the following excerpts and consider how they relate to our current situation. In his chapter about...

On the topic of Coronavirus and the travel ban, Trump’s travel ban sidesteps his own European resorts. The President’s newly implemented European travel restrictions to the US conveniently side step a ban on nations where three Trump-owned golf resorts are located. No politics there, just plain greed. Trump has been under fire for visiting his properties in both countries as president and using taxpayer money to fund his trips to and from while at his...

Live-blogging the Fifteenth Amendment: February 22, 1869 On February 22, the Senate took up the revisions that the House of Representatives had made to their proposals from one week prior. The House had struck from the Senate’s version, as sent to the House, the section extending the protections of the Amendment to qualifications for office, as well as the companion Amendment reforming the Electoral College. Senator Stewart (Republican from Nevada)...