The Art of Disparagement When you disparage someone, you are making false and injurious statements about something. Usually it refers to comments made about a business or product rather than a person directly. Directing such false and injurious comments against a person is called defamation and most often takes the form of libel (written or visual) or slander (spoken or audible). All of this specificity is intended to get to the bottom of the comments…
Multi-Billion Dollar Democracy I see that the Harris/Walz team is touting that they have raised $540 million from donors (mostly small donors) in the last month or so (basically, since Harris announced). That seems like a lot of money to me, so I looked it up and was surprised with what I found. On a website called USA Facts, a not-for-profit, nonpartisan civic initiative that seeks to make government data easy for all to access,…
The Way We Were The 1973 film by that name starring Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand was impactful to me for many reasons. To begin with, the author of the script and the book on which the movie is based, Arthur Laurents, was a Cornell University graduate who was a contemporary of my mother. He was born about 10 months after my mother, so he was probably not Class of 1937, but he wrote his…
American Dynasties There are certain families that have done everything they can to place themselves at the center of American life. It almost seems that they can’t help themselves. In the early days of the Republic, the gold-standard name was Washington and yet our first president and father of our country did everything to distance himself from being viewed as a king. He voluntarily left office after two terms and never did anything to try…
Hope Is Making a Comeback They say that the best political campaigns are those that appeal to change for the future. While people are generally fearful of change, they also want it because it gives them something to look forward to and few of us are ever totally content with the status quo. Normal modeling would suggest that there should be 20% of the population that likes what it has and is more worried about…
DNC Denouement Today starts two gatherings of great interest to many Americans. In Flushing Meadow we have the start of the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament, and in Chicago we have the start of the four days of the Democratic National Convention. I first went to the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament in 1977, the last year it was played at The West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills. That was a small, but grand venue with…
Turning The Page On this, the first day of the DNC, the big talk is about the speech tonight by Joe Biden, who will be introduced by his wife, Jill, and will give both him and the audience of loyal Democrats at the convention his final say and give him their final farewell. The questions that are most prolific today in the convention hall, outside amongst the protestors and on the air among the pundits…
The Big Mo Everybody knows what I’m talking about and the word is on everyone’s lips these days…momentum. Obviously I am mostly talking about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as their campaigning goes from swing state to swing state, rattling the voters’ cages and beating the drum. Strangely enough, there seems to be little of an artificial nature to it. There is genuine enthusiasm for the Harris/Walz ticket and it is leading to record-setting fundraising,…
Approaching Singularity Recently I was sent a book by a colleague who was surprised that I had not read Ray Kurzweil and his two books called The Singularity is Near and the more recent The Singularity is Nearer. Kurzweil is both an inventor and a futurist who has become largely acclaimed as the guru of AI prognostication. The term “singularity” is taken from math and physics and means that special point in a mathematical function…
Veepstakes Well, all the cards are on the table now that Kamala Harris has chosen Governor Tim Walz of the great state of Minnesota as her running mate. As we all know, the final beauty contest occurred this weekend with visits to her by Walz, Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. In theory, Shapiro and Kelly might have helped Harris in the key battleground swing states they are from, but…