Standing Strong in China We are all familiar with the iconic picture of the unknown “Tank Man” standing in Tiananmen Square, blocking a column of tanks in a student-led protest for more civil liberties in China. The result was thousands of deaths and arrests of Chinese citizens in the ensuing days of protests. It was a threshold for the world, but less so for China, itself. I saw a BBC piece where a reporter…
Getting Out of Voting The biggest problem faced by liberal democracy is disaffection. It is a pernicious problem because the vicious cycle it breeds is obvious. If you feel your vote doesn’t count or that it won’t change anything, then perhaps you get apathetic and choose not to bother voting. The forces of darkness prevail, and they not only push policies that further disadvantage those disaffected non-voters, but they put in place voting restriction…
The World Can Use a Guy Like You Yesterday, I was getting my hair cut at my favorite $17 Albanian/Uzbeki barbershop on Broadway. I was in a spaced-out frame-of-mind, given my long day of transatlantic travel, followed immediately by a movie birthday party for my granddaughter and her dad. They were showing that 1985 classic, Back to the Future. I got to see the flux capacitor go from needing plutonium to generate 1.21 Gigawatts of…
Alone in New York I just watched an obscure independent film called Alone in Berlin. It starred Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson, so maybe it shouldn’t be so obscure. It’s message was somber and serious, but it rings loudly in my ears. It is the story of Otto and Elise Hampel, who in 1940, during the invasion of France, lost their only son in battle for the Third Reich. His death, in a lonely forrest…
Huawei Hoo-hah I rarely come up against a problem I cannot conclude on if not have a preferred solution for. As the expression goes, not always right, but never in doubt. I have just found one that completely confounds me. I know its a big deal, but I cannot for the life of me see an easy answer that doesn’t sound totally crazy. The problem is the building and recently ripened problem of what to…
The Kuomintang Candidate Richard was a young adventurer who wanted to see the world now that he had missed the greatest event of the century, World War II. He had been too young to enlist and then it ended with the flow of other young men returning with stories that he could never formulate based on his own lack of experiences. Richard wanted to be a writer. He was trying to form his own…
Blue Wave Blunders I have never registered for a political party in my life. I suspect what started as apathy has turned into resentment for the system at this point. I probably should try to help select the Democratic candidates (there is zero chance I would ever register Republican or even Libertarian). The truth is that I find most of the Democratic candidates (except perhaps Bill DeBlasio this time around) as somewhat acceptable and…
The Ego Spiral Sigmund Freud laid it out for us 120 years ago. He got his start at the task of educating the public in the popular aspects of psychoanalysis with his The Interpretation of Dreams, followed by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious and eventually Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and The Ego and the Id. The jokes that come to mind ranging from the…
A Low-IQ Individual It turns out that according to Donald Trump, Joe Biden is “a low-IQ individual”. He and Kim Jung Un are in agreement on this. Of course, Kim Jung Un called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” last year. The word dotard, according to Merriam-Webster means a person in “a state or period of senile decay marked by decline of mental poise and alertness.” Using the thirty-five-year-old North Korean dictator as a benchmark…
The Warrior Cult Patrick was a loyal citizen from the time of his youth. He was born of the Roman Empire to a clerical family living in Western Britain (what we now think of as Wales). He was intended to study the classics and either take his place as a Roman orator and politician, like his father, or perhaps a priest like his grandfather. But his mother was a Celt and a Druid princess at…