It is never OK to tinker with the election process, but no combination of things done by not-POTUS will dot a single “i” or rejuvenate a specific uncrossed “t” in the career of POTUS.
Author: Kilgore Forelle
The Balfour Declaration
November 2 marks the 100th Anniversary of Great Britain’s Balfour Declaration. In 1917, PM Arthur James Balfour wrote a letter to Baron Walter Rothschild declaring support for a Jewish homeland to be carved out from Arabic territory. Why is it that the British feel so comfortable with this kind of mapmaking?
Words Poorly Used #114 — Policy
POTUS immediately responds to events with a public relations front. He pats himself and government employees on the backs for doing a great job, long before any rational performance review could take place. Then he begins to make policy before our eyes.
Words Poorly Used, Another Devil’s Dictionary #4
Will of the people — That for which the people have no comprehension until they are told of it by politicians.
Secession / Unification
Nobody asked but … I know how I feel relative to the problem in Catalonia. I favor Catalonian Independence. But it makes me really examine how I feel about separatist situations in general. I look first at the situation with the province of Ulster in Ireland, a province that was broken out and retained by…
Tax Reform
As with every Congress, talk of tax reduction is in the air. They pump up the promise by multiplying by years. The current pie in the sky is calculated to be $1.5 trillion over 10 years.
Journalism and Philosophy
At today’s philosophy shared interest group we talked about journalism and the question came up whether journalism was coincident with philosophy in any way. It occurred to me, thinking about it, that philosophy and journalism may have started in the same way.
Cognitive Bias #5 — Recency
It is easy to throw around the fake news claim because of the premium put on newer information by both news deliverers and news consumers. So much of the news is soon swept aside in the memory hole that we tend to believe more and more in the latest, perhaps mistaking it for the best.
Words Poorly Used #113 — Appropriation
Don’t we humans make a distinction between appropriation and misappropriation? In the sense of legislation, it means adding money to an enactment, sufficient to pay for the enactment or to establish a spending target.
Rookies
Decades ago, it was common wisdom that the Hunt Brothers could not go broke if they threw away hundred dollar bills as fast as they could pick them up and toss them. It was thought to be an NP-Hard problem. But the Hunt Brothers did figure out how to do it.