The Bell is Tolling
A post-Sandy bike ride down the buckled and duneless Ocean Parkway, clued me to the new abnormal. Not only will the ocean have its destructive way but so will its swollen sister waterways.
SO FAR LEFT, WE ARE RIGHT
Two Glorious Failures
George and Stan were born a few months apart in 1922 only to die a few days apart some ninety years later. Both distinguished themselves after emerging from inauspicious upbringings, George in Avon, SD and Stan in Akron, OH. Though they were widely admired, neither grabbed the big, brass ring atop their notable achievements. Less [...]
Spy v. Spy
Videotaping would be “subject to too much scrutiny in court,” one DIA officer suggested in Thailand and CIA counsel concurred: “Even totally legal techniques will look ugly.”
Ain’t Necessarily So
Religion addresses a human yearning to fathom our place in an unfathomable universe and to immortalize our earthly mortality.
Ides of Ramadan
Dorian Dale further contemplates conflict with Iran and imagines the screenplay that might ultimately find its way to the Silver Screen. (Inspired by real and potentially real events. Bonus points if you can identify the mystery couple.)
Ayatollyah So!
Rosy neo-con visions of sugar plum oil fields and Jeffersonian democracy fairies transforming the Middle East have blurred beyond recognition over the past decade. So, it’s a good time to change the subject and refocus
God Helps Those Who Help Themselves
You absolutely must be the primary sentinel of your own health. To be effective in that capacity, you have to be in touch with your body and deduce what is good or bad for it. Today’s given wisdom is often tomorrow’s discredited procedure and may even be hazardous to your health.
Fat Cat Manifest: Rev. Ike’s Thinkonomics
If you guaranteed most folks an income next year of one million bucks, but it came with a 70% tax rate, what percentage would sign on the bottom line? Do you suppose there would be a huge groundswell of tea baggers with five-figure incomes turning up their noses on principle over this outlandish top marginal tax rate (which still prevailed in Reagan’s first term)? I, for one, would sign up in a heartbeat then register Republican and rejoin the NRA, lest anyone try to get their mitts on my remaining $300,000.
Philosopher King Wenceslas
As the playwright’s allegory is a triumph of farce over fear, so too was Havel’s call to “step out of living within the lie” that was the “post-totalitarian system.” By the end of year, Czecheslovakia’s Velvet Revolution had toppled, without firing a shot, a dictatorship that violently suppressed the ‘Prague Spring’ twenty years before.
Obama’s Iago – The ‘Indispensable’ Man
True to his Harvard Law School roots, the current occupant of the White House opted for an elitist approach to the worst economy since the Great Depression. He signed up central banker types, including a former Treasury Secretary and a former Fed Chairman.
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