Monthly Archives: June 2016

Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it. That is the end stage. If they no longer have socialism to save them, then we are into feudalism. We are into private … Continue reading →

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller … Continue reading →

I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they … Continue reading →

We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed … Continue reading →

The fear, desperation, binary choices, and foul language of the current presidential campaign carry my mind back to the Reagan Administration. I had this on my wall for years:

America is, in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education. The first occurred in the fifth century B.C., when Athens underwent a change from an oral culture … Continue reading →

What I am saying is that just as the television commercial empties itself of authentic product information so that it can do its psychological work, image politics empties itself of authentic political substance for the same reason. It follows from … Continue reading →

It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. As typography once dictated the style of conducting politics, religion, business, education, law and … Continue reading →

For, like the printing press, television is nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric. To talk seriously about television, one must therefore talk of epistemology. All other commentary is in itself trivial. —Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, (New York: … Continue reading →

“Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama’s failures,” McCain said, according to The Washington … Continue reading →

“It just hits you like a ton of bricks when you think about it,” fumed a senior officer who has been in the military for nearly thirty years and was in Afghanistan when he had this revelation. “The Department of … Continue reading →

In a press conference, President Obama said the shooting at the Orlando nightclub Pulse, which claimed 51 lives so far, marked the deadliest in United States history. I think he means the deadliest by non-state actors: Waco Siege, February 28 … Continue reading →