These past few days, I’ve been feeling a special empathy with the children whom the United States government ripped from their families at the border and sent to special facilities. My empathy comes from knowing in the most intimate way possible some of the emotional challenges that these children will face throughout their lives. You […]
By making the opposition to capital punishment part of church law, Pope Francis cited a moral reason to oppose the death penalty: because “it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Of course, morality is the first victim when people feel threatened. Fear stokes a certain American blood-thirstiness that made a […]
An unstated but obvious unofficial policy of the New York Times is to undercut the Democratic Party in news stories, even as it pretends to support virtually all of the positions that Democrats hold in its editorials. The game this year consists of using the heavily-charged word “socialist” as much as possible to describe the […]
I took a brief trip to Pittsburgh this week during the two-day outburst of treasonous remarks by Donald Trump, who first said he believed Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin over U.S. intelligence services, then tried to weasel out of it by focusing on one word of one sentence of a long diatribe, but still managed to […]
There always have been a limited number of ways for companies to sell more goods or services. The most obvious are to develop new products or to sell in new territories or to new markets, the latter being the point of global trade. Just as significant is to the creation of new needs for an […]
Whether grilling hamburgers, attending a parade, watching fireworks, playing softball or zoning out to the Dirty Hairy binge-a-thon on Sundance TV, our celebration of July 4th commemorated an obsolete document. All the fuss about Independence Day celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, easily recognized by its key passage, “We hold these truths to […]
Just about everyone with whom I’ve spoken these past few days is stunned and depressed because of the accelerating accumulation of Trump Administration actions that are against the best interests of most Americans, morally offensive, signs of a growing autocratic state or some combination of the three. At the risk of driving half my readership […]
When one advertiser does something completely new and different, like when Budweiser put a dog named ”Spuds MacKenzie” in TV ads in 1987, you may not notice. But when every third ad has a dog in it, as what happened in the first decade of this century, you see a pattern. So without further ado, […]
Read More… from New anti-Trump trend on TV: Say you’re sorry when you do something wrong
Virtually all Democrats and independents and significant numbers of Republicans have joined the mainstream media and much of the right-wing media in condemning the new U.S. policy of separating children from their families at the border no matter what the circumstances. Even evangelical celebrities like Franklin Graham (Billy’s boy) who have made excuses for the […]
Atlantic’s editors must have all taken stupid pills on the same day or forgot that editors are also supposed to check the math. Or maybe they thought it was a science fiction fairy tale when they agreed to run “The New York City Subway Is Beyond Repair” by software expert Peter Wayner? Wayner proposes to […]