On Christmas Eve, I did two things I almost never do.  In the afternoon I actually went to see a movie in a theater.  My curiosity about the...

The following story is interesting on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start.  So in no particular order: 1) The Swiss are e...

Climate change is easily the most difficult dilemma ever faced by humanity.  It will only be solved by hard work and pure genius nurtured in...

A 1984 oil painting by John Charles Roach, depicting the U.S. Navy's fast cruiser USS Wampanoag performing her designed mission, i...

When Charlie Brown Christmas premiered in 1965, I was a high school junior living in northwestern North Dakota—an exceptionally harsh place ...

Understand the Fed is extremely difficult.  I have read over 350 books on that institution and its history and have been following the subje...

Probably nothing demonstrates so vividly the dramatic shift to the right in USA politics as the story of Hillary Clinton and her role in the...

Being a committed republican (that's republican with a small "r", in the classical sense of being a republican ), it always c...

Donald Trump is a real estate speculator with perfectly horrible taste who loves to splash his name on buildings in giant letters.  Not cont...

Tony summed it up best in last Sunday's post when confessing he had been wrong (he had been low on his earlier estimates) about the $100...

The champions.  Don't laugh—these guys just saved the world...NOT There has been a bunch of self-congratulatory bilge coming from th...

It is hard to believe that Germany's economy isn't hurting.  Their European customers are in a major austerity lockdown, trade with ...

I just posted this at DailyKos, , where there are a lot of so-called liberals and progressives who get a bad case of vapors when someone men...

The Power to Govern: The Constitution -- Then and Now by Douglass Adair and Walton H. Hamilton W.W. Norton & Co., New York, NY, 1937...

One of the lasting lessons of the early 1980s economic catastrophe was that for much of USA, local law enforcement didn't have much to d...

Because of their position in the Presidential selection system, Iowa tends to get more attention than would be typical for such a small stat...

Small countries tend to be very interesting for a wide assortment of reasons.  If they have a small language like Holland or Denmark, for ex...

The easiest way to determine if a government or organization is serious about solving the problems of climate change is to look at how much ...

This past Sunday, Stirling Newberry noted that the latest New York Review of Books includes a review by Paul Krugman of Robert Reich’s ne...

Movies can be important—even if most are not,   The Big Short has the smell of an important movie and since the story of what happened to t...

In 1970, I was in Finland and needed to do some shopping for a very young niece.  I spotted a nice little stuffed toy I thought she might li...