Tag Archives: Journalism

Goodbye Gene Weingarten  I am not sure how many readers here know who Gene Weingarten is.  He is a humorist who has authored a column for the last 21 years that has appeared each Sunday at the end of the Sunday Washington Post magazine.  I am not sure where he was out letting before then, although I think he had some fame, but not huge amounts.  Anyway, without warning in today’s column, he announced “The Short Goodbye,” his final column, mostly...

As a subscriber to Professor Heather Cox – Richardson’s “Letters From An American,” I have access to each daily article. And as a follow up to yesterday’s “Letters From An American,” today’s, September 23, 2021 submission gives additional detail to the amount of effort made to subvert the January 6th certification of the election by Congress. As detailed in this edition, there were four distinct players or Trump staff who laid much of the...

“Letters From An American,” September 22, 2021, Professor Heather Cox-Richardson Continuing Professor Heather Cox – Richardson’s detailing the events before and after President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. It gets more interesting as a Federalist lawyer details instructions for Vice President Pence to follow and dissolve, reject, etc. the Electoral Vote Certification on January 6, 2021. How does an attorney advocate the...

The events are akin to the film Seven Days In May with a role reversal detailing a rogue General instead of President. Seven Days in May begins with a riot in front of the White House. It’s the late 1960s and U.S. President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) has recently signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Now, demonstrators for and against the treaty are coming to blows. The populace is afraid. The military-industrial complex...

Coronavirus dashboard for September 10: was Labor Day indeed the peak of the Delta wave? I have been saying for some time that the Delta wave would probably peak around Labor Day. It’s not certain yet, but it is looking increasingly likely to have been the case. The Delta wave struck in both the US and Israel at almost the same time, with almost the same vaccination profiles. Here’s what cases per capita (bold lines) and deaths per capita...

Beware of “The Narrative”! Back in 1979 philosopher Jean-François Lyotard was commissioned to do a report for the province of Quebec that turned into a book, The Postmodern Condition. I remember that book well because I read it during my graduate studies that focused on narrative analysis. A central theme of Lyotard’s book was the “death of metanarratives,” such as the Idea of Progress or Marx’s Class Struggle as the engine of history. Fast...

Portland Not Burned To The Ground  Over this past weekend, I was in Portland visiting for the first time family who gathered for a reunion, with my second daughter, Caitlin, with two of my grandsons, having moved there in January from San Francisco (she is a psychiatrist with the VA system). I had been through a few times in a car but never stopped.  So curious to check it out.  I generally liked the place and had a good time. I also decided to...

Analytical Bias The world is made up of systems.  Our body is a system, or in fact a system of systems.  What we call “society” is another system of systems, as is the natural environment.  And all these meta-systems are themselves elements in even more encompassing systems that interconnect them.   But these systems are very complex, difficult to explain or predict.  One successful strategy, which has had a revolutionary impact on how we live,...

by Dale Coberly Condorcet and Malthusian essay relevant to Social Security and the problem of too much kindness [note, important sentences in the following are quoted from another author because it’s easier for me to write that way.  Credit will be given at the end of the article.] Goetzman: “In 1794 as the Reign of Terror raged the Marquis de Condorcet penned one of the most optimistic tracts of the eighteenth century.  He wrote...

Are Former Professors As National Leaders More Prone To Black Swan Events That Overthrow Their Governments?  Probably not, but recent events in Afghanistan suggest an example.  This would be the sudden departure just over two weeks ago on Aug. 15 from Kabul of then Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, which triggered the sudden collapse of his government and the unexpectedly sudden takeover of Kabul by the Taliban. Even they did not see this coming. ...