ParisTampaBlog

Saw the lovely item below in today’s Guardian. Now the delightful person who strangled his wife in his disappointment with her giving birth to a baby girl may not be the rule, but he’s evidently not the exception either. How long is it that our soldiers have been in Afghanistan? More than 11 years, since [...]

Mike, Why isn’t this guy, James E. Miller, and not David Rubenstein, correct (see below)? Or at least why do I think he’s correct? Why is the service that teachers offer somehow different from any other business? You of all people ought to know? Anyway, his reasoning is, and has for a long time been, [...]

In his State of the Union address the other night (January 24) the President speaks of American values, or at least he refers to them (whatever they may be) three times.  Here is what he  says: “What’s at stake aren’t Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. And we have to reclaim them.” “Tonight, [...]

The poet Donald Hall writes (in Personal History, Out The Window, The view in winter, The New Yorker, Jan 12, 2012) about his mother: “My mother turned ninety in the Connecticut house where she had lived for almost sixty years, and spent her last decade looking out the window. For my mother’s birthday my wife [...]

Isn’t the world’s principal problem, or at least that of the developed and democratic world, of which we are a part, the fact that we have allowed our elected representatives to assume as our representatives greater responsibilities than they, or we, can possibly meet given our present financial resources? Isn’t it the fact that we, [...]

The cartoon is taken from a review article, War No More, in Foreign Affairs by Timothy Snyder of Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of our Nature.  

Larry Arne writes in an Imprimis article (where he does say a lot of nice things about our Declaration of Independence and Constitution) that the current Gross Domestic Product or GDP of the United States is about $15 trillion, and that state, local and federal spending is about $6.7 trillion. From these two numbers he [...]

Christopher Hitchens cites some of the recent findings of science to demonstrate that our traditional belief in God, or rather a conventional Christian God is obsolete. He writes: Would we have adopted monotheism in the first place if we had known,  (1) That our species is at most 200,000 years old, and very nearly joined [...]

It’s not often one reads one’s own exact thoughts in the words and thoughts of another. But it does happen, and it happened once again this week as I read the Economist’s “leader,” The right Republican.  The article makes it demoralizing clear that there is absolutely nothing presidential about the Republican presidential candidates. Why would [...]