ParisTampaBlog

Now I’ve never forgotten what President Reagan’s said while visiting Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987. His words on that occasion, were, as many of you also will remember, “MR. GORBACHEV, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL” Now lately I’ve been reading with great enjoyment and appreciation the Western writer, Louis Lamour. (He would prefer, of [...]

Peoples, countries, states are often asking themselves, “What is to be done?” Certainly since the time of Vladimir Lenin’s question, Что делать, and probably long before. If the problems are acute enough (or the leaders of the revolt unscrupulous enough) the answer is/may be revolution, as in French, Russian, and earlier English (1649 and 1688). [...]

On his New York Review Blog  the poet Charles Simic writes, “My own inordinate interest in what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet has to do with my childhood. When I was three years old in Belgrade, German bombs started falling on my head. By the time I was seven, [...]

I take the following from the Harvard Magazine of Januaary-February, 2012. My “pick” of Fred Shapiro’s pick of  choice Harvard words: We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. —Louis D. Brandeis, LL.B. 1877, quoted in Labor, October 14, 1941 There may [...]

Read this today in a Times op-ed piece by Brian Greene, Waiting for the Higgs Particle: “Higgs thus suggested a rewriting of the very definition of nothingness, filling otherwise empty space with a substance capable of bestowing upon particles their mass.” Haven’t we heard something like this before? —Wasn’t it the carpenter Joseph’s son who [...]

I find the arguments of the libertarians persuasive, as I do no less the arguments of the liberals, of those who would drastically limit the role of government in our lives in order to empower the individual, as well as of those who would grow the role of government in order to lessen the natural [...]

It has been brought to my attention (see HERE —Lawrence Baines), and HERE) that our Education secretary Arne Duncan, while speaking at the 114th Annual National PTA Convention on June 11, 2010, had this to say (among much else): “For years, we have actually been lying to children and lying to ourselves by pretending that [...]

It’s generally felt, often articulated by both business leaders and politicians, that our public school system is not graduating enough STEM college majors, and that of all those who do go on to college intending to major in math and the sciences, too many of them are now switching majors along the way. According to [...]

The month of October is almost over and I have posted nothing. That this not happen, that I allow a month a pass, I’ll share with you a couple of ideas that I take from Hanna Arendt’s Crisis in Education. First this: “… the essence of education is natality, the fact that human beings are [...]