Tag Archives: Journalism

The terrorist mass murder in Christchurch, New Zealand two weeks ago has sent me back to my archives to retrieve my documentation of Anders Breivik’s extensive plagiarism of the writings of William S. Lind, et al. Did I say “extensive” plagiarism? Breivik copied and pasted the whole 19,000 word pamphlet, making minor revisions here and there and deleting around 4,000 words that dealt with more arcane academic topics, such as Derridean deconstruction....

Looking for Mister Good Barr I confess. I posted The Barr Letter and Useful Idiots of the Jaded Left to troll for tin-foil hats. I am agnostic on the Mueller investigation. I have never viewed Mueller, Comey or Rachel Maddow as the savior of truth, justice and the American Way. My objection to Taibbi, Greenwald et al.’s gloating is primarily against their premature ejaculation — although their glee is also reprehensible under the circumstances. But here...

The Barr Letter and Useful Idiots of the Jaded Left As everyone knows by now, President Trump has been totally “exonerated” for everything, ever, by a four-page letter from William Barr, the Attorney General whom he appointed expressly to “exonerate” him. With regard to potential obstruction-of-justice, on page three of his letter, Barr cited Special Counsel Mueller’s statement that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a...

Maybe No Conspiracy Or Coordination, But Lots And Lots Of Collusion Trump and his supporters have been loudly claiming that the Barr letter about the Mueller report has shown “no collusion!” which has been shouted loudly from the rooftops, with many supposedly respectable sources such as the New York Times agreeing with this assessment, thus supporting the long running Trump/Hannity repeated claim. But I note that the big headline on this morning’s...

The United Kingdom’s protracted attempt to leave the European Union has upended the two illusions by which the world has lived since the end of the Cold War: national sovereignty and economic integration, the twin end points of history, according to Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated 1989 essay. Juridically, the world consists of 191 sovereign states, which freely enter into treaties, agreements, and associations to order their relations with one another. The UK is one of them. Its failure...

As I explained in a conversation, what was done most recently by some wonderfully-over-funded people in an effort to get their children into a Tier one school certainly did not have to happen in the manner it did. They could have just approached school authorities and with a “Mellon’s” (Back to School’s – Rodney Dangerfield) audacity and offered to pay full ride and make a sizeable donation to the school. Maybe I am wrong; but, I do not know of many...

What’s New About Fake News? The apparently falling standards for what people are willing to believe in seems to be the topic of the day.  We have immense, well-capitalized media outlets like Fox News just making stuff up, crazy conspiracies on the internet, a refusal to accept scientific expertise on matters, like climate change, where it is as well established as it’s ever been.  What’s up with all this? I was provoked into thinking about this by...

Click on the picture to get a great, detailed view of these magnificent and architecturally significant structures. Claude Scales’s Photo of the day: there is a lot of Brooklyn Heights literary history in this photo. The poet W.H. Auden lived in the top floor apartment of the brownstone row house at One Montague Terrace, nearest the corner of Montague Street and Montague Terrace, in the winter of 1940-41 when he wrote his “New Year Letter.” If you go to...

The Tsunami of Tstupidity An edited video of an encounter between Senator Diane Feinstein of California and a group of young campaigners for the Green New Deal is eliciting much outrage and indignation on Twitter. Senator Feinstein’s unpardonable offense is that she became impatient with being repeatedly interrupted and made a few sarcastic remarks having to do with her knowledge, experience and authority and their lack of those characteristics. I don’t...

LONDON – Surveys from round the world show that people want secure jobs. At the same time, they have always dreamed of a life free from toil. The “rise of the robots” has made the tension between these impulses palpable. Estimates of job losses in the near future due to automation range from 9% to 47%, and jobs themselves are becoming ever more precarious. Yet automation also promises relief from most forms of enforced work, bringing closer to reality Aristotle’s extraordinary...