The Sovereign State of AT&T When I was in college and studying Latin American political history, we were reviewing the recent political changes in Chile. While a small country, Chile was symbolic because it was very much an isolated country on the far side of the world. In the days before the Panama Canal, anything on the Pacific side of the Andes was a long way from home and if you went th Chile, unlike…
Doling it Out Yesterday was a national day of mourning and it was both unusual and yet very much an important and necessary event for the nation. I was nine years old in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas at the Texas Book Depositary Building as his motorcade drove past. While it was in the days when cell phones didn’t exist and not everyone carried around portable video recording capabilities…
Paying Your Share I have been lately using what I will call a Donald Trump tax trick. I lost a bundle a few years ago on a perfectly valid attempt to launch a business with my son. Many of my friends attended Winter Wonderland on Staten Island so they know I spent a lot of money making that extravaganza work in one sense (the attraction was well-attended) and not work in another (for various reasons…
RBG Rollover Yesterday when I went out in the car to run an errand, MSNBC came on through my Sirius Satellite radio and I found myself in the middle of a live Q&A between the Supreme Court justices and the Attorney General of Mississippi (Scott Stewart) and the U.S. Solicitor General, Elizabeth B. Prelogar. While Stewart’s responses to justices’ questions were competent and articulate (as much as I disagreed with most of them on principle),…
The Dog Whistle Gone Astray There are several phrases that have been making the rounds for the past few years in the political pundit community. I hear them repeatedly on MSNBC and they always jangle my sensibilities for some reason, most likely due to their recent overuse. The one I really don’t like is “gaslighting”. It means to cause someone to question their sense of reality. It comes from a play Gas Light produced in…
The Next Generation They say now that humans first appeared on earth some 300,000 years ago. They seem to have “scientifically” estimated that Adam and Eve came on the scene about 150,000 years ago (I have no idea how that calculation is even possible). The last ice age started about 12,000 years ago right after a comet of significant proportions hit the earth about 1,000 years prior. They say this was an extinction-level event that…
Declaring War Today, the Department of Justice began its court proceedings against Steve Bannon for his role as one of the leaders of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol Building. Bannon, the ultimate devotee of the notion that any publicity is good publicity went on the record saying that he and his like were using this indictment as a red flag to signal that they are now going on offense against the Biden Administration…
Autobiography We went to go see Kenneth Branagh’s new film, Belfast. It chronicles the youth of a Protestant boy growing up during the strife of the religiously war-torn Irish city. The message is quite stark and clear, growing up amidst religious strife is no fun. The young boy is presumably Branagh at about age nine. His father and mother are Belfast natives who live on a street near where they were raised in working-class Belfast.…
Self-Defense I am watching the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and have just witnessed his testimony on cross-examination. The court has just taken a ten minute break because this eighteen-year-old defendant who shot three people in Kenosha last August, broken down crying as he tried to describe the events that involved his shootings. His defense is clearly oriented towards describing this young man, who was seventeen at the time of the incident, as young and innocent and…
Guns or Butter There is a classic economics model and a graphical curve that represents the trade-off between the economic production of guns or butter. The phrase has come to represent the societal standards of how fiscal expenditures should emphasize defense spending versus social programs. The term originates from around the time of WWI when the U.S. faced an uncomfortable shortage of gunpowder, specifically because it did not control the production of necessary nitrates, which…