Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
College football and professional golf exemplify the nauseating money-grubbing of today’s sports. In the early second century C.E., the Roman poet Juvenal wrote: “. . . nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses.” Loosely translated, it meant that the Roman people had […]
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes
Sweden, Finland, and Britain are in America’s sex and gender crosshairs. Ukraine and Russia are at war. China and Taiwan are throwing more than words at each other. North Korea is firing ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan. India and Turkey are making goo-goo eyes at Russia. Saudi Arabia is buying oil from […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
The only thing that the two mayors have in common is a Spanish surname Tucson, Arizona, and Miami, Florida, are similar in some respects and quite different in others. One of the differences, as will be discussed momentarily, is the thinking of their respective mayors, both of whom have Spanish surnames, which is about […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
Those at the top of the public sector are doing well while Tucson stays mired in poverty. The City of Tucson and the surrounding Pima County have a lot of poverty. The city’s poverty rate of 20.79% is near twice the national average, and the county’s poverty rate of 15.94% is about 1.5 times […]
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
A book explains why the nation has split along class lines more than racial and ethnic lines. In today’s polarized America, a surefire way of being characterized as a member of the wrong political camp is to favorably quote an author, commentator, or academic who is seen as being in the wrong camp. A case […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Their exclusion reveals DEI’s double standards, stereotypes, discrimination, and sophistry. Hamza Kopanja, a 32-year-old Croatian-American, is excluded from diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, although by any definition of “minority” and “disadvantaged,” he fits the bill.* He can’t complain about the exclusion, however, because it would be seen in some quarters as proof that he is […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
Especially telling is a water bottle that is marketed as eco-friendly. Like an archeological dig, the litter that my wife and I pick up on our daily five-mile walk says a lot about American society. The daily debris comes from all socioeconomic classes. Receipts found among some of the items show that they were bought […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
A new bridge in Los Angeles is one example out of thousands. Los Angeles recently celebrated the opening of its new Sixth Street Bridge, which connects downtown to the city’s eastern district and crosses over an industrial area and the L.A. River (drainage wash). Designed to safely accommodate pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles, it is indeed […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
If America’s leaders had read Prisoners of Geography, maybe America would’ve stayed out of Iraq and Afghanistan. It hasn’t improved my middling IQ, but over my adult life, I’ve read hundreds of books on history and geopolitics. Almost all have been thick ones, many have been impenetrable ones, and most have been scholarly ones […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
History suggests that the opposite is true about not only tats but also piercings, ear saucers, nose rings, and general scruffiness. Judging by news photos and videos, the psychopath who killed and wounded innocent people at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, resembled a large number of today’s Americans: disheveled, unwashed, […]
Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
The cherry-picking of history has led to speech codes, a new intolerance, and fragile college graduates. The great work of history below is not only relevant to today’s war in Ukraine but also to the identity politics and victimhood that pervade the United States today. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder, […]
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes
At a minimum, it will lead to boycotts against my home state of Arizona and hometown of Tucson. You aren’t interested in my opinion of the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling or whether I’m pro-life or pro-choice. Likewise, I’m not interested in telling you. But both of us should be interested in the fact that […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
The phoniness of free riders who benefit from the heavy lifting of earlier generations. Long before the word “gay” came into popular use, long before the word “pride” was modified by the word “gay,” and long before gay marriage was sanctioned, two gay guys, Ken and Gerry, were good friends of my working-class parents. Lifelong […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
You decide which of the two is right. Roland Fryer, a professor of economics at Harvard and a self-identified conservative, believes that student achievement can be boosted by giving K-12 students short-term monetary rewards for showing up on time, paying attention in class, and completing homework. Fredrik deBoer, a professor with a PhD from Purdue […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
Northern Arizona University joins the diversity bandwagon of group-think instead of scholarship. As a defensive measure, I’m prefacing this commentary on diversity with the fact that throughout my career I was at the vanguard of equal rights, affirmative action, diversity, racial sensitivity training, and racial encounter groups, during an era when the battles were […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
One of the many jobs that I held before and during my college years in order to pay my college bills was a supermarket checker. Maybe that’s why I like to strike up a conversation with checkers to see how they’re feeling about their job and issues of the day. A recent visit to a […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
This is why Boeing and Amazon picked Arlington, Virginia, instead of a city like Tucson for their headquarters. Boeing recently announced that it will be moving its headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia. This follows Amazon’s decision of a year or so ago to establish its second headquarters in Arlington. Neither of these two corporate […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
My wife recently rummaged through family keepsakes and found bills for an emergency hysterectomy that her grandmother had in 1944, at St. Francis Hospital in Olean, NY, in the northwestern part of the state. She was transported 20 miles by ambulance from her rural home outside of Bradford, PA. Below, in rounded numbers, is what […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
Media consolidation and interlocking directorships are the reasons. If you want to know why Big Media on the left and right is so unoriginal and shallow, a couple of left-leaning sources have the answer. The sources also explain why the residents of most cities and towns across the country no longer have locally-owned news […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
It’s difficult to see it getting any lower than the Brazilian Butt Lift This might not be news to many Americans, but being an oddball disconnected from the pop culture and trends du jour, it was news to me—and shocking and distressing news at that. I’m speaking of the Brazilian Butt Lift and other medical procedures […]
Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Maybe someone has to be on drugs to understand the connection. Some sort of mental impairment must be keeping me from understanding a news story about social equity and marijuana dispensary licenses in Tucson and the rest of Arizona. I don’t consume drugs and have about one drink a week, so it’s probably due to […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
A sample of the smart people who were fooled into believing that Putin was a reformer who embraced capitalism and democracy. Under Stalin’s reign of terror, there were many notable Americans who continued to believe that communism was an ideal political and economic system for ending class distinctions and achieving equal results, or in today’s […]
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Putin’s family suffered greatly in the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and now he’s sieging Ukrainian cities. Vladimir Putin was born and raised in Leningrad, or what was formerly known as St. Petersburg. No doubt, as with all of us, his childhood experiences set the stage for his adult beliefs. Unlike most Americans, however, he […]
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
The white privilege of Yogi Berra, Joe Garagiola, and my forebears on Dago Hill in St. Louis. The following book is an excellent biography of baseball great Yogi Berra: Yogi: A Life Behind the Mask, by Jon Pessah, 2020, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 566 pages. The first several chapters describe Yogi’s boyhood in […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
Employees see themselves as enlightened about diversity but are members of a race-based employee group. I’m such an oddball that Amazon is incapable of pigeonholing me when it recommends books to buy. Netflix has the same problem when it recommends movies. Amazon’s logarithms can’t seem to fathom from my extensive book-buying history that I don’t […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
It has nothing to do with the local Chamber of Commerce but a lot to do with culture and governance The Tucson Chamber of Commerce just selected a new CEO. His background is similar to the background of the CEO of the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce. Both have extensive nonprofit and government experience but […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
The same question can be asked about hundreds of other unique ethnocultural groups. When I was a kid long ago at the leading edge of the boomer generation, I wasn’t white. But now I’m not only white but also privileged and fragile. What happened? In the St. Louis of my youth, I was Italian and […]
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes
They’re so out of touch that they don’t see the irony in the name “Washington Commanders.” Our commanders in Washington, D.C., have named their football team after themselves. “Washington Commanders” is a perfect choice, given how they command the rest of the nation in what has become a de facto command-and-control economy and political system. Other […]
Estimated Reading Time: 23 minutes
The intellectual foundation of critical race theory, identity politics, hatred of whites, and the rejection of both reason and classical liberalism. Many Americans are concerned about the splintering of America into identity groups and are bewildered by critical race theory, queer studies, the proliferation of genders, cancel culture, the claim that reason and logic are […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
The rest of the story about race and poverty You probably won’t be surprised by the following poverty rates by race/ethnicity: Asians: 8.1% Non-Hispanic Whites: 8.1% Hispanics: 17.0% Blacks: 19.5% U.S. Average: 11.4% Year: 2021 Source: https://www.federalsafetynet.com/us-poverty-statistics.html You might be surprised, however, by the following absolute numbers of Americans in poverty, especially the last number: […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
In the name of diversity, America’s racial classifiers obliterate diversity. Long ago, long before the diversity movement and the sprouting of departments of diversity and inclusion in academia, government, media, and industry, I lived in a San Antonio barrio, where my friends and neighbors who were Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, referred to themselves as […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
Judging by media coverage, there are only right-wing extremists. Groucho Marx said that he didn’t want to be a member of any club that would have him. To paraphrase the comedian, I don’t want to be a member of any political tribe that would have me, especially not the control freaks who want to remake […]
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes
Arizona Daily Star January 9, 2021: A record-breaking year of homicides,Tucson police combat gun violence The headline referenced above is about my hometown of Tucson setting a record for homicides in 2021: 93 homicides for a city of 542,629 people. That comes to one homicide for every 5,834 people. (Another half-million people live in the metro area […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
A review of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, by Michael Shellenberger, Harper Publishing, New York, 395 pages. Living in Tucson makes me feel a kinship with Michael Shellenberger, the author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. He laments how the progressive wing of his party, the Democrat Party, has ruined his hometown […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
A review of Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America ________________________________________________________ Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, by John McWhorter, Portfolio/Penguin, 2021, 201 pages. ________________________________________________________ John McWhorter says some important things about wokeness and critical race theory in this book, and as a black man, he can say […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
The only green in the new Rivian truck is if it comes in that color. For Americans in the upper percentiles of income, education, social awareness, and environmental awareness, electric vehicles (EVs) have become the latest status symbol, virtue signal, and silver bullet (green bullet?) for reducing global warming. This suggests that they might be just […]
Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
Yesteryear’s radical chic morphed into today’s wokeness and virtue signaling. Fifty-two years ago New York Magazine published “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” by Tom Wolfe. With his outstanding satirical talent and observational skills, Wolfe described the bizarre scene at a cocktail party at a 13-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue, the home of Felicia and […]
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
The real racists in America are those who judge people on their pigmentation. Being white, or olive, or beige, or swarthy, or whatever color has been affixed to this Italian by woke affixers who care deeply about pigment but have no original thoughts about pigment and thus simply parrot prevailing pigment pabulum, it’s impermissible for […]
Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
In the name of wokeness, one ugly slur has been replaced by another. Warning: The following is a representative sample of past and present racial/ethnic slurs and stereotypes. If you grit your teeth and bear with it, you’ll see why they’re repeated here. Poles were known as dumb Polacks. The Irish were known as mics […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
My wife and I shop for groceries and other essentials at four different stores in the City of Tucson, although we live a few miles outside of city limits and there are closer stores, including a Whole Foods, which is too expensive for our frugality. One of the four stores is Walmart. We will no […]
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
A lesson on how a seemingly simple subject is actually quite complex. Statistics don’t lie, but they sure can be cherry-picked. Consider this recent headline from the Arizona Daily Star, the daily newspaper in Tucson: Tucson is still among the best in the West for home affordability Despite surging home prices, Tucson ranks among the […]
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Shades of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial of 100 years ago. Being retired, my wife and I were able to keep the TV tuned all day to the Kyle Rittenhouse trial as we went about our normal activities, stopping what we were doing to pay attention to the proceedings when something important happened in the […]
Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
The reasons can be found in the book Gulag and in the book Tunnel 29. Gulag, by Anne Applebaum, Anchor Books, New York, paperback edition, 2004, 677 pages Tunnel 29, by Helena Merriman, Public Affairs, New York, hardback edition, 2021, 318 pages Reviews by Craig J. Cantoni Bernie Sanders is an avowed socialist and is […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
We wouldn’t put up with it in the physical world but put up with it in the virtual world. The media have been full of stories and commentaries about such tech giants as Facebook and Google, regarding their impact on society and control of advertising dollars. I have my own story about them. My story […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
You wouldn’t buy a turkey without a left-wing, but Americans buy a lot of news stories without a left-wing I’m not on the right or left but still can’t help noticing that the adjective “right-wing” is used in the media about eight times more than the adjective “left-wing.” Not only that but the former is typically […]
Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Their eager participation in the tuition loan scam reveals their hypocrisy, greed, and political self-dealing. American universities pride themselves on instilling communitarian values in students and enlightening them about social justice, diversity, and inclusion. It’s debatable whether their particular take on these important subjects has brought benefits or harm to society. It’s not debatable, however, […]
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes
The company’s woke employees don’t see the irony of being headquartered in wealthy Los Gatos. The Wall Street Journal ran a news story recently about demonstrations at Netflix in response to comedian Dave Chappelle’s supposed transgressions against transsexuals. Here’s an excerpt: “In a list of demands sent to Netflix management, a group of transgender […]
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
As Martin Luther wrote, “The time for silence is past and the time to speak has come.” DW News out of Berlin recently ran a major story on its evening newscast, which is broadcast in America on PBS. No, it wasn’t about skyrocketing energy prices due to Green policies. Nor was it about Russia holding […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
Editors’ Note: It should be remembered that the federalization of the student loan programs in the United States was accomplished by a Senate amendment to Obamacare late on Christmas Eve in 2009 when the Senate had a filibuster-proof 60 vote majority (58 Ds and 2 Independents) and voted Obamacare into existence. The federal takeover of student loans […]
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
There’s a much better name for the day, one that captures the true spirit of today’s America October 11 was Indigenous Peoples Day. It used to be called Columbus Day before it became woke. Unlike some of my fellow Italians, I don’t have heartburn over the demise of Columbus Day. However, the silly wokeness behind […]