Monthly Archives: July 2016

“Our country needs your ideas, energy, and passion.” When I heard this I was reminded of the ROTC guys I debated at the U. of Michigan in the fall of 1978. I’d been bicycling in Europe the previous couple summers … Continue reading →

Watching Katy Perry on stage in Philadelphia endorsing Hillary Clinton reminds me of ski trips to Tahoe and watching Family Guy at night for want of anything better to do at the motel. Stewie was a big fan of Katy … Continue reading →

Could only listen to the first couple lines out of Biden tonight. Thought of Biden staffer Jeff Connaughton‘s sections in George Packer’s The Unwinding and Connaughton’s authoring The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins. Philadelphia sees a string of servants to … Continue reading →

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law! More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that! More: … Continue reading →

In my hometown of Philadelphia an aged Paul Simon’s uninspired rendition of Bridge Over Troubled Water brings memories of 1972. I listened to Simon and Garfunkel a lot in the early 70s, and sang their songs when bicycling through New England … Continue reading →

Is there something hallucinatory about Melania Trump entering and exiting the stage to the sound of a song written by a gay Parsi or is this just me? More hallucinatory than just Melania Trump, I mean. Where is Hunter Thompson? … Continue reading →

The Guardian: France is historically seen as standard bearer of western secular liberalism and has been singled out by Isis as a key target… Islamic extremists may see the US as a source of moral decadence and economic exploitation, but … Continue reading →

BBC: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has suggested testing all US Muslims to see if they believe in Sharia law, and deporting those who do.… Mr Gingrich, who was in the frame as Mr Trump’s potential running mate before Indiana … Continue reading →

Adrien and I would often argue about whether dictators were products of their societies or whether the inverse was true and societies were shaped by the trauma and repression of dictatorship. In Iraq I saw the kidnapping epidemic that swept … Continue reading →

We Americans have the dangerous tendency in our international thinking to take a holier-than-thou attitude toward other nations. We consider ourselves to be more noble and decent than other peoples, and consequently in a better position to decide what is … Continue reading →

The BBC reports that Bernie Sanders has endorsed Hillary Clinton, saying “there was a significant coming together between the two campaigns and we produced, by far, the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party.” I find this … Continue reading →

Today’s Guardian: Maybe it was too great an ambition to dismantle quite a sophisticated country with a long-established civilisation, traditions and culture of its own, and to recreate a mid-Atlantic construct of what government should look like, often going against … Continue reading →