Liberals, Conservatives, Joan Baez and Ending the Nation-State

Liberals, Conservatives, Joan Baez and the Nation-State
The other night I saw a reprise performance of the recent American Masters episode on the life of folksinger and political activist, Joan Baez.
It was a good program and showed what a remarkable person Joan Baez is.    She walked the walk, even to the point of voluntarily accepting incarceration [...]

Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself – 2009

Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself – 2009
The famous words, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” come from the first inaugural address of Franklin D. Roosevelt (March 4, 1933). These comments, of course, were made in the midst of the Great Depression. The parallels between those times and [...]

Latest Pope Bashing by the Media

Latest Pope Bashing by the Media
Eager to seize even the slightest pretense for bashing the Pope, news media, European governments, and even medical journals have taken his recent comments about African AIDS completely out of context.
The Lancet even went so far as to accuse His Holiness of “manipulating science” and having “publicly distorted scientific [...]

The Commission on Presidential Debates

The Commission on Presidential Debates: A National Scandal
Following up on the previous post, I did a little research on the mysterious Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which organizes the televised presidential debates.
The sordid details of this Commission supply the most tangible, unequivocal evidence imaginable that the Republican and Democratic parties are a duopoly, collaborating [...]

Open the Presidential Debates to Third Parties!

Open the Presidential Debates to Third Parties!
A recent Zogby poll showed that most American voters would like to see the Libertarian party presidential candidate, Bob Barr, participate in the presidential debates.
However, the Commission on Presidential Debates refuses to allow this. They require that a candidate meet two inclusion criteria:  (1) that their name appears on [...]

Notes: the spiritual children of Abraham should not battle each other

Some entries in this blog are formal articles. Others, like this one, take more the form of working notes, outlines for later development, or ‘thinking out loud’. Some are complete, and some are just sketches. For now I will label such entries as ‘Notes’.
I am aware of and distressed by the [...]

Game Theory and the American Two-Party Racket

This is a short post. I’m experimenting with various strategies to gain more site visitors. One is to make more short, focused entries like this one, to produce search engine “hits” for a wider range of queries.
Here we refer again to a recurring theme of this site: how American politics is, under the [...]

Flat Tax

Let’s continue to hammer away at one of the core problems with the current presidential race: Republicans and Democrats are both part of the status quo; part of the System that wants to keep people distracted, divided, oppressed, and afraid. They want to keep attention away from ideas that would promote real [...]

America’s Malaise: What is the Real Problem?

In her Huffington Post blog, Middle-East expert and columnist Judith Kipper recently added an article titled “America’s Malaise“. She made some good points. At least it’s good to see someone explicitly addressing the problem. America does suffer from something – you can call it malaise, severe uncertainty, a crisis of confidence, [...]

Politics: Inner and Outer

A fairly little-known fact is that Plato’s Republic, a work often taught in government and political science classes, is really about psychology. If you read the Republic closely, you see that Plato (through the character of Socrates) introduces the ideal State as a metaphor for the human soul. The idea is to, using [...]