General Interest

Regular people don’t feel so bad anymore about not knowing exactly how the economy works; the stock markets, commodities markets, money markets, futures (!) markets, the role of the Federal Reserve Bank, crises of confidence and all sorts of intangible “market forces.” Most of us figured, well, fine, if we  don’t know exactly how all […]

It’s a good thing our steel mills, shipyards and auto manufacturers didn’t go belly up in 1940, otherwise winning the two separate major wars in the Pacific and in Europe that together were called World War 2 might have been a problem for us. Odds are that Toyota wouldn’t have retooled their Camry factories to

Yesterday Mitch Mitchell died, the last surviving member of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, a band that changed rock & roll music forever. The band consisted of Jimi Hendrix on guitar and vocals, Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass and beginning in 1967, made three studio albums of music that would still sound

It is better to be good than evil, better to love than hate, better to help than hurt, better to give than take. Everybody knows and accepts that. So, what’s our problem? Is it so hard to do the right thing? Are we that perverse a race of beings? Religions sure as hell dropped the

The internet is full of information; good, solid information along with the usual drivel that’s always circulated through any information medium. Like with anything else, it’s not so hard to separate the factual from the ridiculous. It’s pretty amazing and something no one could have predicted a scant 20 years ago. Look at all the

You see the videos of loin-clothed men shooting arrows at airplanes. You read about the loss of natural habitat for isolated primitive tribes moaning about them like they were Siberian Tigers or something other than human beings. You hear about such people being devastated by diseases that bother almost nobody else these days. They live

Three days in a hospital and home again, just a little the worse for wear. A bit humble, but not all that much (sorry). Good to be home, back to my grumpy self, or almost there, anyway. Still a bit weary for full-blown irascibility. But still, it’s real good to be home and really good

If you want to know how somebody feels when something terrible happens to them or is done to them, just remember how you felt when bad things happened to you. That's how they feel. They might seem different to you, maybe they're the opposite sex, maybe their skin tone is different, or the clothes they

There’s a guy out there in America screaming at the top of his lungs about human rights. He also has declared himself the avowed enemy of the Bush Administration and their vile and illegal war of aggression in Iraq, all the while entertaining American troops at USO shows (7 war zone tours) and frequently visiting

And so an era is over. Joe Torre turned down a pay cut to manage the Yankees again this year, ending a remarkable 12 year run as the most successful baseball manager of his era. The success is not really as remarkable as lasting 12 years as Yankee manager since George Steinbrenner bought the team