Author Archives

  • WHO ARE WE SERVING?

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    “You’ve been dreaming lies again, Susana.” ― Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo   Go ahead and pull up a chair. We are going to be here a minute or two. Every week seems to come with its own little touch of… Read More ›

  • THE DOGS OF WAR

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    “Access to useful information also was determined by literacy and the availability of reading material. It is now widely agreed at least for Britain that increases in literacy were relatively modest during the Industrial Revolution. Yet literacy is not particularly… Read More ›

  • APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEIVING

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    “Do you tell other people when you realize they were right?” ― Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: The Perils of Defensive Thinking and How to Be Right More Often   Some of you may be familiar with Tammany hall and… Read More ›

  • IT FEELS LIKE A NUMBER

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    “They are pretty good at improvising, but God help us if they are given time to think. Dean Atchison” ― Robert Dallek, Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House   A couple years ago I was coaching 10U baseball. It… Read More ›

  • FIRST WEEK FOLLIES

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    “Nothing is more irreligious than to persecute the seekers of truth in order to keep up absurdities and superstitions of bygone ages. Nothing is more inhuman than the commission of ‘devout cruelty’ under the mask of love of God and… Read More ›

  • ELECTIONS MATTER, OR DO THEY?

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    “The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.” ― Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios   Yesterday was Election Day in Tennessee and today… Read More ›

  • IS IT US OR THEM?

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    “Orozco’s despair was not just in finding himself poor, but in discovering that effort, honest intentions, and gentlemanly status had nothing to do with sucess in a commercial economy.” ― Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn… Read More ›

  • HERE WE GO AGAIN.

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    “The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what… Read More ›

  • IT MAY NOT BE A NINETIES POP SONG, BUT ISN’T IT…

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    “And Paris! All afternoon in someone’s attic We raised our glasses And drank to the asses Who ran the world and turned neurotic.” ― Galway Kinnell   If one looks for samples of irony, they really need to look no… Read More ›

  • WHO’S LISTENING?

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    “Perhaps the most indispensable thing we can do as human beings, every day of our lives, is remind ourselves and others of our complexity, fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness.” ― Antonio R. Damasio   Yesterday I came across a lengthy piece… Read More ›