Wayward Landlubber

      I don't know if there is a book on making fun of people. I suspect that if there were, some people would still not understand the nuance between making fun of power and cruelty, that might include me. But unlike Dennis Miller or Jesse Watters, the first who did a face-plant on Foxnews and disappeared and the second faceplants on Foxnews daily and has not disappeared, I don't get paid for my wit. Or lack thereof.        It's not likely that any of my readers would know who Andrew Tate is, or they wouldn't have before the most spectacular self-own in the history of really stupid self-owns. For those who did not know what he did before he became the laughingstock of MAGAdumb, he is, or was a kickboxer. It is not likely he will be involved in professional kick boxing for quite a while, since he now faces indictment for human trafficking in Bulgaria, along with his brother. So feel free to kick the kickboxer while he is down. While that is not enough ...

     I am not well experienced in diplomacy on a world-wide scale. The best advice I have recieved is to walk away from a confrontation. My social media history would demonstrate my inability to follow  that advice, but I have lived through a number of diplomatic crisis, whose importance I was old enough to understand. Others were an important part of the histories I would later read.      Before my political awareness, I remember reading in My Weekly Reader about when the Premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Kruschev, hosted Vice President Richard Nixon to an exhibit in Moscow that featured American products not available to the beleaguered people of the Soviet Union. This became popularly known as the Kitchen Debates. What I was able to learn as I matured is how this exhibit was designed and paid for by the State Department to demonstrate in front of a television camera the benefits capitalism offered the much beleaguered American housewife. Another d...

     Hillary Clinton has demonstrated yet another talent that Donald Trump can't claim; she wrote a book without a ghost writer. To be fair, she is credited with being a co-writer, her companion writer being a familiar name in political suspense novels, but we all know that Hillary can assemble a sentence effectively. I am pretty sure her name is not on the book as a publicity device. Besides the people who hate Hillary don't read much anyway, those who read would be more inclined to give her a good reception. I do not know how this book is being reviewed but it's a pretty good read. And clearly, Secretary Clinton was more than a passive contributor.      The story is of a female Secretary of State who was appointed by a president that wanted to ruin her political future. We are not told why she is hated by her president, which I think is a plot weakness. After all, these kind of internecine battles are practically a cliche in thriller/fiction, as in real l...

     We have honored thinkers for longer than we have had a "Western Democracy". For those who watch Foxnews, that was about 2500 years before John Wayne. People think about many things, philosophy, science, physics, political science, medicine and many things that require sustained thought about serious issues, and a published record of accomplishments. Most people stopped thinking about how deeply people thought prior to the Greek philosophers of ancient Athens, even though there were Egyption pyramids 2000 years before classical Greece. Somebody had to do some serious thinking in order to accomplish all of the schools of thought necessary for that construction. From cutting and transporting the massive limestone and granite blocks, to the method of lifting them into place (still not understood), to the design of the various internal chambers. Adding to that we must think of the construction of the barges to transport those massive blocks down the Nile to the constructi...

     Many years ago, about 10 years BTM, before Trump mistake, I was watching the Dylan Rattigan show on MSNBC. I liked his show because he discussed economics, a science that most of us incompletely understand, which is why republicans can get us to believe such crazy stuff as the Laffer Curve and Trickle-down economics. Rattigan's guest on this day was a fellow who billed himself as a "stand-up economist". He was at the time a Professor of Economics at Reed College. Clearly not Harvard or some other fancy-pants university, but anytime somebody can find humor in what is called, "the dismal science", they have my attention. He had a pretty good shtick. He was able to explain such economic models as Keynesianism, Free-market economics, and other issues, while finding the humor most of us would miss. Before I get too far here, have you considered the irony that an economist could be funny? Have you ever listened to Allan Greenspan try to explain irrational exubera...

     I'm a writer, of sorts. It occurs to me that, until a writer gets critiqued in a national publication, it's probably best to leave some daylight between ambition and attainment. Nobody pays to read what I write, and I don't have any offers, but I write anyway.  I had a need to say something for many years but said nothing that lasted beyond a short memory. I am now finding my voice. It has not arrived quickly, but will not fade away quickly. At first I started with a memoir. It turned out to be a pretty good story, though underappreciared. I had no interest in technical writing, have no aptitude for poetry, an interest in screen-writing though not enough time to attain that dream. One famous screenwriter wrote the memorable  line about a "writ writ for a rat", if only I can learn to write lines of that quality. Writing a novel requires an ability to write about people who may be complete strangers in real life. I once said to my oldest son Quinn, who has a ...

Those of us who admire the Democratic process and proclaim it's strengths, even though it's greatness has become something of an irony of late, have arrived at an inflection point. It's not working out. To be fair, it has often not worked out, at least for those of us citizens not on an inside track. The eponymous CRT would be just one example. But we could always say before, that we were improving, we were reaching for what was beyond our grasp. Sometimes we were able to hold on to that thing that was just out of reach, but our grasp was not quite solid enough to hold on firmly..      I'm an admirer of philosophy. The act of philosphyzing, not necessarily the philosophers. It is the only option for those of us untutored in philosophy. Had I been born a century earlier, I'd be one of the old men around the pot-bellied stove at the hardware store, solving the various problems to come before our discussion group. Naturally, the Greek philosophers, though we know them ...