My plan to post a short reflection every week failed almost immediately. The dual demands of a full-time job and part-time academia meant little time for part-time writing. Nevertheless, I'll try again. Inflation, Elon Musk buying Twitter, and the leaked first draft opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eclipsed the Russo-Ukraine War in commentariat… Continue reading Notes from the Week of May 8, 2022: Inflation, Citizen Musk, Dobbs, & Russo-Ukraine War
Larry Summers was on Ezra Klein's New York Times podcast to discuss the state of the world economy (here is the transcript). It was worth listening to only to hear Klein getting mugged by reality, although he still seemed to want to beleive Covid and Ukraine caused high inflation. Say what you want about Summers, but he admitted… Continue reading Notes from the Week of March 27, 2022: Inflation & Media
Some notes looking back on last week: SCOTUS nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's hearings were mostly uneventful. So far she's saying what she needs to say to get appointed. She strikes me as a good addition to the Court because I don't think she's an extreme judicial activist. She handled the unfair question about the… Continue reading Notes from the Week of March 21, 2022: SCOTUS Appointment & Russo-Ukraine War
Very few people read. Readers make the investment of precious time and energy need a return on that investment. In thinking about this website, I wonder if I've had a good sense of what people want to read. I think it's fiction--but that takes me a long time. And I think it's essays--but I'm bad about… Continue reading Notes from the Week of March 14, 2022: Ukraine Invasion
It's October 2021 and the simulation is getting weirder and weirder. Strange how opinion journalists' inevitable exhortation "we must do something" has become "we must do everything." In the last 20 years, national rhetoric heated-up faster than temperatures in pre-Millennium climate change projections. In America, there was governmental overreaction to the three great calamities of… Continue reading Overreaction
At the end of the 19th century, the United States temporarily broke with the foreign policy tradition of isolation from global politics and a strict adherence to the Monroe Doctrine’s focus on the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. became an imperial power in a remarkably short period of time, primarily through its conquests in the Spanish-American… Continue reading Sound and Fury: The Last Stand of Isolationism
President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. To most, that sentence states a fact. To many others, that sentence is just an ideological argument revealing someone's epistemological preferences. And that's the state of American civic life so far in 2021. The Art of the Steal Trump is a fascinating character. Before getting to denouncing him,… Continue reading Trumpageddon
A view of US politics as of August 2020.
I’ve witnessed history being made four times in my half-century of life: the end of the Cold War, 9-11, the Financial Crisis of 2007-08, and now the Coronavirus pandemic. Those events—spaced roughly by 10 years—play outsized roles in public dialogue and analysis. They are omnipresent in people’s imaginations as they wrestle with current affairs. However,… Continue reading Flyover Bourgeois GenX Man
The graphic above is from a discussion on a UK website called The Student Room. Chicago Fog believes this is a good representation of the parameters of political beliefs reflected in contemporary society: communism on one end and fascism on the other. Clearly, the maker of the spectrum must be from Canada, but this graphic… Continue reading The Hazards of Political Belief Spectrums
In retrospect, after further thought and reflection, this was not even true at the time it was written. Under Vladimir Putin, Russian foreign policy was very expansionist and, as we all know today, played the central role in propping-up Bashar al-Assad’s government in the Syrian civil war. In comparison, so far the Chinese have avoided Middle Eastern embroilment.
This entire essay is half-baked. Don’t bother with it. Chapter 37 of David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom does a far better job explaining the perils of violent revolution. Click here to read David’s great book on his website!
