Tag Archives: politics

I will get to an actual policy discussion in part II of this pair of posts, but first I have to ask “what the hell is happening at the New York Times”? I am old enough to remember a time when it had actual editors, but the Journal of Record seems to be edited about as much as my posts here (spelll check if you are lucky). First it seems that  Damien Cave and Amy Chang Chien believe that Richard Nixon was president of the USA in 1979. I insert a...

According to yesterday’s navel-gazing piece in the Boston Globe*, “on-the-fence” voters are edging to supporting Trump because they feel looked down upon by Democrats. WTF? Do they seriously believe that Trump *doesn’t* look down on his supporters? It is blindingly obvious that the only person on the planet that Trump cares about is Donald Trump. The toolkit of Trump and the Trump GOP consists entirely of cultivating resentment: resentment of American...

More on what is going on with Purdue and the Sacklers. This is probably one of the sorriest events one could ever read about. The sales success of OxyContin was promulgated on it being nonaddictive. By taking a 1980 brief/letter reporting the results on the use of opioids in a HOSPITAL SETTING and deleting such setting, Purdue was able to magnify the sales of OxyContin a time release dose of an opioid. The sales gave the Sackler family the...

The alleged “appeal” of Ron DiSantis is that he’s “Trump without the baggage.” So why is DiSantis (and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, the other Trump imitators) doing so poorly? The answer is that the Trumpenproletariat *want* the Trump baggage. To them, that’s his appeal.The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan nailed this decades ago: the medium is the message. Trump is the medium and thus Trump is the message. Anyone else is a different medium...

Who saved the US from a pandemic and delivered a good economy. The 2024 political cycle, a triumph of recycling. President Biden and former President Trump are preparing to star in a sequel most Americans do not care to see. That means that eyes will be on the vice-president, Kamala Harris, as well. Because Mr Biden is the oldest president ever, and would be 82 at his second inauguration, voters will scrutinize Ms. Harris with unusual care. The...

Fireworks, drone swarms, military history and the military future. Oh and China always China. This is a followup to The 101st Chairborn: History is a Prankster The key new point is drone *swarms* that is thousands of drones in coordinated flight. the point is that e even if a drone is slow so that the chance of shooting it down is 99.99%, the chance of shooting down all of 10,000 isn’t (0.9999)^10000 = 1/e because the drones draw fire from...

Decades ago, I read a column by Andrew Young, the former Atlanta Mayor and UN representative, in which he wrote that you should never trust anyone who says they aren’t racist. You should say I’m working on my racism.Recently, the former South Carolina governor and current GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley omitted to mention that slavery was a cause of the Civil War (it was *the* cause–see the Cornerstone Document, as just one exhibit). Now,...

As vehicles and outdoor appliances become increasingly electric, long term gas usage – and “real” prices – decline  – by New Deal democrat What is the “real” cost of gasoline? When measuring this, some people compare with the CPI. But that actually just tells you the *relative* inflation in gas vs. other items. That’s why, for example, when I want to look at the “real” cost of housing, I measure against income, such as average hourly earnings....

from Dean Baker We have been seeing numerous stories in the media about how people support Donald Trump because he did such a great job with the economy. Obviously, people can believe whatever they want about the world, but it is worth reminding people what the world actually looked like when Trump left office (kicking and screaming) and Biden stepped into the White House. Trump’s Legacy: Mass Unemployment The economy had largely shut down in the spring of 2020 because of the pandemic. It...

I’m reading Homelands: A personal history of Europe by Timothy Garton Ash. The book is organized by decades, and the decade of 1980-89 was a historically significant one for Central Europe. By the end of the decade, the “communist” dictatorships in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia had collapsed.Real history resists simplification, but to simplify, the seemingly permanent division of communist East and capitalist West succumbed to the...