It seems to me that there are two issues that Democrats have got to get serious about before the election. First of all we should recognize that the issue of Biden’s age is not going to disappear. People are not crazy — Biden is old enough to make the VP…

There was a perfectly reasonable article today in Foreign Affairs: “Afghanistan’s Corruption Was Made in America”. Except for the surprise at what happened. Afghanistan was a case of colonial corruption — whether we want to call it that or not — and the mechanisms of colonial corruption have been well-documented…

We’ve been hearing about the debt limit for months, but familiarity makes it sound sort of normal. That is spectacularly wrong. We all know it would be a disaster for this country to foreclose on its debt. That would not only have massive economic impact, beyond that it would undermine…

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy that undermines much domestic and foreign policy. One way to put it is that democracy is seen as a kind of natural way for societies to organize themselves. What could be more normal than a bunch of people getting together for mutual benefit…

The ideas here are based on a small amount of data and are undoubtedly well-known in some form to many people. However they don’t show up in the usual discussions of Bach, and they certainly don’t seem to have influenced performances on recordings. I’m been playing some pretty basic Bach-three-part…

Heather McGhee begins her book The Sum of Us with the question “Why can’t we have nice things?” …

It has become clear from all polls that the key issue for voters in this midterm election is inflation. That’s a difficult issue for Democrats, so we have tried to make it something else: January 6, the Supreme Court, etc. The time has come to realize that all of that…

There’s an important article about climate change in the latest IEEE Spectrum. It’s only two pages long, but there is much to think about. It is high time to recognize the reality of what we’re fighting. The article points out that a reasonable estimate for the cost of the energy…

We’re not paying enough attention. This midterm election hides a real danger of Depression. We’re stumbling into exactly what happened in the 1930's. The Great Depression of the 1930’s occurred when the financial authorities of the day responded to a sudden downturn with the opposite of what was needed. A…