“Down the corner by the hotdog stand I seen a man I said ‘Howdy friend, I guess it’s just us two’ He screamed a bit and away he flew Thought I was a Communist” -Bob Dylan, “Talking World War III…
What We Could (Should) Have Done for Aleppo
As a pacifist, one of the most frequent criticisms I face is that I am advocating “doing nothing” in the face of atrocities near and far. There are just bad people in the world, the argument goes, who will kill…
Expectations of American Power
I almost titled this “Donald Trump and the Expectations of American Power”. Just as you could title anything in the last decade “Harry Potter and X” and have it be an instant hit, so too does placing a “Donald Trump…
A Life Lived Out Loud: Remembering Jonathan Bernbaum (1982-2016)
On Saturday morning, I woke up late, as I usually do these days. I’d been out driving till about 3:00 AM, wrapping up Friday night much earlier than normal. I was feeling a little sick. That night, I had nightmares,…
We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
Look at that headline. Look at it! I know I was excited in my 6,000 word election recap to observe that the problems with our reported unemployment figure and its relationship to labor force participation data had become a mainstream…
A Radical Leftist in Donald Trump’s America
“I vote for the Democratic Party They want the UN to be strong… Once I was young and impulsive I wore every conceivable pin Even went to the socialist meetings Learned all the old union hymns But I’ve grown older…
All Politics is Personal: The Epic and Foreseeable Failure of Hillary Clinton
Disclaimer: I have deliberately waited a week to post this since the election because most of my friends and people I care about have spent the week grieving. If you are still grieving, if you are tender from the election…
Obligatory Uber Book Update
It’s strangely unsettling writing a book without a title. Both American Dream On and The Best of All Possible Worlds were titles before they had any other content whatsoever. And Loosely Based was entitled on 12 June 2001 (as a…
Don’t Stand for It
During the Iraq War, I made an effort not to stand for the United States’ national anthem while it played. The context for this was almost always sports games, because even though ESPN Radio (which I listen to a lot…
Watching (Mariners) Baseball is Bad for My (Mental) Health
I write here a lot about competitiveness. So much so, apparently, that I wrote two posts entitled “Winning and Losing” on this blog, both mostly about RUDU, both in 2010, two posts separated by That Summer. You can read them,…