Like Carl Sagan’s undetectable fire-breathing dragon, we must take them on faith Published on Friday, March 22, 2019 by Common Dreams article Ever since 1969, when he rose to national prominence with the story of the My Lai massacre, Seymour Hersh has been one of the best-known investigative journalists in the world. His career has not been without controversy….
No, The Deep State Didn’t Cause Trump’s Syria Flip-Flop
Published in Lobe Globe Jan 14, 2019 ( link to article) The post hoc fallacy is one of the more common logical errors. The fact that the sunrise follows the rooster’s crowing does not prove that the rooster caused it. There is a similar tendency in political commentary to attribute every event to the observer’s cherished…
Extraordinary Popular Delusions
How childish belief masquerades as folk wisdom and warps our politics. Published in CommonDreams Jan 7, 2019 ( link to article) In a previous column, I described how the Republican Party’s Bad Ideas-Industrial Complex churns out an endless stream of pernicious policy ideas. But that invites a question: how did these ideas get so much…
The Case for Lawn Care Regulation
Outdoor power equipment pollutes the air and hurts our ears. It’s time that government bans the leaf blower. Published in Washington Monthly Jan 4, 2019 ( link to article) From the first growth of grass in late March until the last fallen leaf at Christmas, the calm of my “bucolic” suburban neighborhood is shattered by…
The Party of Ideas
A pity they’re all crackpot ideas. Published in Commondreams Dec. 27, 2018- link to article I recently attended a conference at the Niskanen Center. It was a think tank gabfest at which the participants were disillusioned conservatives hoping to chart a course toward a saner political center-right. Jonathan Chait did a near-ecstatic write-up of the meeting and its promise…
The End of Rolling Thunder? We Can Only Hope So!
How a Nixon campaign dirty trick turned into a full-blown psychosis among America’s paranoid fringe. Published Monday Dec. 17 in Common Dreams (Link to article) The news media inform us that Rolling Thunder (always described in the press as a veterans’ advocacy group or some other such positive term) will run its final annual Memorial Day…
The Bad Ideas-Industrial Complex
Why must taxpayers subsidize rabidly partisan think tanks? One of the integral components of Beltway ecology, along with the Pentagon, intelligence spooks, contractors, and lobbyists, is the think tank. Whether it’s called a foundation, an institute or a trust, it’s not only as important as the other big players, it synergizes with them and cements…