ParisTampaBlog

Ari Shavit in a loud, almost crying wolf op ed piece in today’s Times is saying the world peace that we have mostly enjoyed since the end of WWII, is near collapse. And the collapse, he says, will come about during the next nine months in one of two ways, either by Iran gaining possession [...]

Nearly 20 years ago, actually January 18, 1993, I wrote the words in italics, below, in my journal of the time. Evidently I was writing a ‘to do’ list for our new President (Bill Clinton who would take office in January 20, just two days later) telling him, perhaps, what I would do in his [...]

About health care William Easterly once said that this could not be “a fundamental right, like, say, those of freedom of movement, speech, association, equal protection under the law etc.” Why not? Because there would be no reasonable end point to that right. When, for example, would one have received all the care that could [...]

What’s missing in Washington? Well it’s not rent seekers. There’s no scarcity, no limit to the number of those who are asking and receiving favors from our politicians. What’s missing in Washington? Well I would say that it’s truth tellers. In Washington it does seem to be that no one is telling the truth. Certainly [...]

From Chapter One of Wilson’s book, The Moral Sense, first published in 1993. Since daily newspapers were first published, they have been filled with accounts of murder and mayhem, or political terror and human atrocities. Differences in religious belief so minor as to be invisible to all but a trained theologian have been the pretext, [...]

What is most responsible for the present state of the world, for the way things are? Isn’t it science and technology? For isn’t it true, as Steven Pinker reminds us, that “…the sciences have made vertiginous leaps in understanding, while technology has given us secular miracles like smartphones, genome scans and stunning photographs of outer [...]

It is Timothy Egan’s opinion, in a December 2011 Times op ed piece, Please Stop Sharing, especially now with the ease of access to internet technology and in particular Facebook and Twitter, that we’re sharing too much. Are we? Can we ever share, go public with too much of ourselves? In important senses isn’t sharing [...]

Mike Thanks for directing me to Kelly Flynn’s piece in Ed Week. Have always, well since I was a public school teacher in 1969, felt the same, that the elephant in the room was bad behavior, student apathy, absenteeism and other such, and that we, teachers, (and administrators, parents, everyone) refused to talk about it. And [...]

In today’s Times (February 20) Thomas B. Edsall summarizes what he sees as the electoral positions of the President and his Republican challengers (in as much as one can lump them together). President Obama, he says, is calling for additional investment in public education thereby growing the chances of everyone to succeed, for revisions to [...]

The passage below comes from a “Stone” article in today’s NYTimes. I couldn’t resist sending it to you, not because I thought for a moment it would alleviate your suffering. I knew for sure that it would not. But, I thought, it would arouse at least a smile, or laugh on your part, the ‘best [...]