[from everything2.com] Alexis de Tocqueville only spent one year in the United States before he wrote “Democracy in America” (1835), which is still one of the best books about that country. The last page of the first volume describes the future evolution of the Russians and the Americans. The English translation is mine, so don’t [...]
Archive for the ‘Current Affairs’ category
Richard Thompson Ford, The End of Civil Rights
May 17, 2009Well, I do wonder if President Obama has seen the op ed piece by Richard Thompson Ford, The End of Civil Rights, in today’s Boston Globe. For Ford makes it clear that the problems confronting Blacks — poverty and unemployment, educational achievement gaps, drug addiction, children without fathers, high rates of imprisonment, and other such [...]
More government and more individual initiative may work best together
May 16, 2009We want less government. We want to lead our own lives with as little as possible government interference. At least until we become aware of social, environmental, and other problems, such as in this particular example the polluted Hudson River. The polluted Hudson is only one such problem. There are myriad others that regularly place [...]
Pakistan, failed nuclear non-state
April 25, 2009Pakistan is an enigma for us in the West. We don’t understand what is going on, in particular we don’t understand it when the new president, Asif Ali Zardari (and the husband of Benazir Bhutto, extremist assassinated twice elected Prime Minister of Pakistan) has absolutely nothing to say, at least to us in the West, [...]
to “take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty”
April 7, 2009President Obama is now in Iraq. We read in today’s Times that while addressing hundreds of troops gathered at a military base the president said that it was time for Iraqis to “take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty,” winning thereby enthusiastic applause. President Obama greeted military personnel at Camp Victory in Baghdad [...]
David Brooks, Rx for the Republicans
March 10, 2009Today in an op-ed piece in the Times David Brooks’ prescribes a course of action for the Republicans. The good news is that David’s prescription offers the no longer grand old party a life preserver. The bad news is that, in David’s view, the Republicans probably won’t take it. What David says is sensible, reasonable, [...]
France and California, Ungovernable
February 21, 2009History tells us that there is nothing inherent in human nature that brings the peoples of one nation together and enables them to act in concert. For populations within countries, no more and no less than the members of a single family, will never be of a single mind but will always represent opposing points [...]
Hardly untouched and unblemished
February 14, 2009Those of you who might not want to think that we are no less a part of earthly life than are rodents and roaches, mites and maggots, as well as those of you who might want to go on believing that somehow we stand apart, pure and good, God’s highest handiwork, might consider the following [...]
Bailout? Best would be more H-1B visas.
February 11, 2009In my last post I wondered what, if anything, our stimulus bent President and Congressmen were stimulating to make our country more productive, because only new production, or GNP growth, will provide new wealth and along with it more jobs. As things now stand the jobs that the stimulus package would create will not be [...]
The stimulus ought at the very least to make us more productive
February 9, 2009What is it that makes a rice farmer in India, and therefore India itself, more productive — a toilet, food stamps, a rural clinic, a school, or a cell phone? Eric Bellman’s piece in today’s Wall Street Journal makes it clear that it’s the cell phone. A tractor might have been similarly effective but the [...]
