Foreign aid has always had its detractors. Many people feel either, “Why should we be giving aid to those ungrateful shithole countries?”, or else, “USAID is such a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy, it’s just another big, wasteful black hole for tax dollars.” Well, I want to share my experience working for USAID some years ago […]
Category: Politics
THE DEATH OF EVIDENCE
Aristotle: you don’t hear much about him these days, mostly because most of his writings are taken as just plain obvious. You can yell at me for trying to reduce Aristotle’s entire opus to one short parable being bandied about the internet these days: it’s the one about two men in a room arguing about […]
THE SECOND COMING OF TRUMP
I’ve been seeing all sorts of postings on Facebook and elsewhere, pointing to Jan 20th as “The start of a Golden Era”, “the day when eggs are 99c a dozen and gas $2 a gallon,” “the day the world will stop laughing at the US”, “a new dawn”, etc.etc. All this really smacks of an apocalyptic […]
WHAT’S WITH THESE PRO-TRUMP BILLBOARDS?
I’m getting bombarded with Facebook posts showing billboards with pro-Trump messages, usually referring to some Golden Age starting on Jan. 20. There are several Facebook pages posting these, but one main one is Next Chapter. Go look for yourselves. There are two very strange features common to most of these billboards. First, the photos appear […]
WHY HAMAS IS NEGOTIATING NOW
Hamas allowed Israel to destroy Gaza in order to precipitate a wider war. They failed. From the beginning of the war, Hamas had no chance of defeating Israel. Their only hope was to resist Israel as long as possible. Indeed, their network of tunnels and supply of missiles made it possible to hold out indefinitely, […]
A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE ELECTION
For most of the history of mankind, and in many countries today, the leader has usually led a luxurious life of debauchery and corruption, oblivious to the needs of his people. Yes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. But for millennia, the People accepted that system as inevitable, so they accepted the status quo and even loved […]
TRUMP’S PEOPLE
Jan. 06 rioters. Pathetic Halloween costumes. Trump’s closing argument was made in Madison Square Garden, directed to a mostly male audience. It was vulgar; it was angry; it was politically incorrect. On CNN, David Axelrod claimed that Trump was closing his campaign poorly, that he should be focusing on the economy and solid issues. I […]
JD VANCE, PRESIDENT?
What would JD Vance do if he were President (quite a likely possibility, I’d say, given Trump’s age and recent dementia)? No one knows, because no one knows what he thinks or believes. He is a total chameleon, who says whatever he thinks Trump wants him to say. He has no ideological core — neither […]
THOSE GOOD-OL’ DAYS OF COVID
The United States boasts one of the strongest economies in the world, with a 2.4% inflation rate and a 4.2% unemployment rate. Yet most Americans think the US economy is doing poorly, and they point to the high price of groceries. What is going on here? I have my own scenario, which I’m not hearing […]
THE RETURN OF POST-MODERNISM
If truth is beauty, does truth lie in the eyes of the beholder? Around 30 years ago, post-modernism was the darling of the intellectual set. I tried to read the main authors — Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Habermas — but found them impossibly pompous and dense. The best I could make out was that their message […]