Government taxation of its citizens goes back at least six thousand years, and at least as far back as the Greeks, the purpose of taxes have always been twofold: To raise revenues for the government and to guide public policy. In the case of Athens, the social policy was to go to war with other […]
Imagine stand-up comic Henny Youngman, king of the one-liners, describing the Trump GOP tax proposals with one of his classic bits: So how big is the tax break for the wealthy in the new tax bill? Why it’s so big that raising the deficit by trillions of dollars won’t cover it… Why it’s so big […]
Talk about the other shoe dropping. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wasted no time after changing one regulation that will decrease access to news and freedom of the press to change another that does the same thing. Less than a week after announcing it would allow companies to own both broadcast stations and newspapers in […]
We typically blame the decline of the news media in the 21st century on one of two factors: the growth of the Internet as a 24/7 source of news and the proliferation of fake and false news. But given much less attention is the consolidation of news media and news-gathering operations. It used to be […]
Read More… from FCC enables more media consolidation. The result will be less real news.
Society has made an historical flip-flop in two paired values we hold about teenaged girls, especially aged 12-16. In the old days, there was little wrong with a 32 year old man courting a 14 or 16 year old girl. As a citizen of the 21st century, I personally find it both distasteful and weird, […]
I can’t imagine that the New York Times editorial staff and news department ever talk to each other. They might not even read each other’s work. If they did, the Times might have to split into two publications or engage in a civil war as fiercely fought as the one between the rapidly-industrializing northern states […]
When a mentally ill ISIS supporter plows a truck into bicyclists in New York, killing eight and injuring 15, Donald Trump calls for the ending of an immigration program that has given our country hundreds of thousands of highly productive and patriotic Americans over the years. But when mentally ill gunmen perpetrate horror after horror, […]
When a mentally ill ISIS supporter plows a truck into bicyclists in New York, killing 8 and injuring 15, Donald Trump calls for the ending of an immigration program that has given our country hundreds of thousands of highly productive and patriotic Americans over the years. But when mentally ill gunmen perpetrate horror after horror, […]
In A Cold Welcome, Ohio State historian Sam White reminds us that the 21st century is not the first time that Europeans in North America have ignored the climate and thereby created human disasters. In the century after the second European discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492, several European nations founded a […]
The day after seeing the first TV commercial for the December holiday gift potlatch seems like an appropriate time to consider the point at which the celebration of Halloween transformed from a secular celebration of a religious holiday to a major factor in the infantilization of American culture. Infantilization occurs when adults continue to act […]