I attended Radius Commercial Real Estate’s 15th excellent annual forecast at the Hilton. One of the presenters was economist Christopher Thornberg who gave an optimistic view of the economy, much of which I agreed with. Regarding the world since Trump took office Dr. Thornberg’s rosiness hit a wall. The current state of things? “Chaos,” he […]
In the evolution of our language, “good enough for government work,” is an expression which has come to mean almost exactly the opposite of what it once did. It began as a way of describing work of high quality, but somehow came to refer to what was just barely adequate. It was probably American in […]
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Democrats lost in 2024 because they supposedly didn’t have the right message. Canadian philosophy professor Joseph Heath offers the message Americans are waiting for. Ever since the New Deal, Democrats have been the party of large-scale improvements: rural electrification, Social Security and Medicare and promises of true universal health care, high speed rail, green energy […]
Centennial Junior High School. Boulder, Colorado. 1973? What happened was this. In PE we were playing soccer (what the rest of the planet calls “football”) and a stocky little guy named Tony kicked the ball out of bounds. Tony was in my German class (please don’t ask), wore his stick-straight hair in bangs and kept […]
If anybody asks you, “What Is the Southernmost point of Africa?” you would probably say “The Cape of Good Hope.” And you probably identify that location with the City of Cape Town, South Africa. But you would be a little off. Cape Town is located at a point which the earliest Portuguese explorers called the […]
Have you heard the one about taxpayers funding a $3 million shrimp treadmill? It is a brain virus spreading through the MAGA world – to validate the utterly lawless vandalism of our government by Trump and his unconstitutionally appointed hit man Musk. MAGA people apparently never heard of “Google,” which when prompted yields the real […]
How do things end? I made a whole career out of writing very short “Thoughts.” But where does a thought end? For years, I’d been jotting down various ideas. They could be a new form of literature. But every such form must have some structure, and a crucial dimension would be its length. Looking through […]
Our glowering POTUS has wrecked all our excited rumormongering with the usual blunt force. Isn’t it in the interest of a benevolent despot to keep his cards close to the vest? Promulgate an air of mystery? I suppose after all these years of having been enslaved by the deep state we should be grateful for […]
Among the songs that Frank Sinatra made famous was one called “The Way You Look Tonight.” I have always thought that such an expression was sickeningly sentimental. Personal attraction, besides being the essence of species perpetuation, is a highly solipsistic matter. Of course it relates to gender. But it also hinges upon all five of […]
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There are people (you may be one of them) who believe that there must always be a reason. By their standards, God has his own reasons for everything that happens, even if they are not obvious to us. It is comforting to believe in such a reasonable God. Alfred Lord Tennyson, who had been Poet […]
Okay, my version probably won’t do well on the hip-hop music charts, but I think it will resonate with some readers on the hip-lumbar charts. It all started one morning at breakfast when my wife said: “My back is killing me.” Being a sympathetic guy, I suggested she call the police and report a sacroiliac […]
Rounding up millions of longtime residents, placing them in detention, and deporting them. Where have we heard this before? If you are not outraged by Trump targeting long-time immigrants, then you are not paying attention. Jews lived “undocumented” in limbo in Germany for centuries. Until they were granted citizenship in 1871. And had it taken […]
“It wasn’t a mutiny. It was the bone-weary ship’s crew selecting – by voice vote – a new captain, one whose brusque nature and laudable transparency in speech gave them hope of precisely the rigorous captainhood the increasing stormy seas obliged. There were trifling misgivings. “The gentleman had been captain once before and had acquitted […]
As you probably know, the words in our language have a tendency to change over time; in spelling, in pronunciation, or even in meaning. But there is at least one case in which the word has come to mean the exact opposite of what it once did. To make matters even more confusing, both meanings […]
