"Blow up the bags of sham" – Jean Arp
As a news-junkie and a journalist, I love stories that unfold, the ones that start with some basics and then explode. In the initial stories, there’s hints of something more. I don’t really know what that something is, but a close read reveals some unanswered questions and odd coincidences. Enterprising journalists take those hints and…
Hang around politics for a while and it becomes pretty easy to identify where arguments come from. Lately, there’s been a bunch of high-minded critiques of COVID mitigation strategies such as stay-at-home orders and non-essential business closures. These critiques are not the virus-denying, anti-vax, conspiracy-based, teenage “don’t tell me what to do” nonsense that we…
August 15, 2017, I wrote an essay called “Antidote to Overload…” It was written after a pretty intense two-week news cycle in which the following things happened: In Charlottesville, Virginia, a right-wing terrorist rammed a crowd of anti-racist protesters, killing one and injuring more. This happened after a day of battles between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists,…
Have you ever thought about what you want the world to be like for you and your family? I am not talking about three-hots-and-a-cot or the basic minimum for survival but what you really want. Have you ever crafted your utopia? I ask because knowing your utopia is a powerful thing. A utopia is target…
On Tuesday, I wrote a Soriano’s Comment about how support for COVID mitigation is way way way higher than what media coverage of the “Open America Again” show-protests (or showtests) suggest. Multiple polls tell us that the showtesters and those who support them make up a fraction of the population. On Wednesday, Washington Post/University of…
On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver devoted his main segment to the United States Postal Service and its money problems. Central to Oliver’s story is the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which mandated that USPS pre-fund health benefits for future retirees. This obligation is unique to government agencies and businesses. Typically, we fund…
Because the White House is handling this pandemic chaotically or not at all, because Trump’s primary method of communication is the lie, because the administration has a segment of the media eager to promote its propaganda, because there is another segment of the media which engages in false equivalency, because we get over-reporting on “protests”…
Over the last couple weeks, when talking to friends, one of us mentions “Groundhog Day,” a reference to the feeling of living the same day over and over. It’s an odd and frustrating feeling that invites complacency and dulls critical thinking. Events melt and words become “Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah….yadda yadda…blah blah.”…
When I was a kid, my mom plopped a box of 45s in front of me and said, “Have at ‘em.” From then on, while other kids were out playing, I’d be in my room with that box, playing 45 after 45 on a junky record player, making stacks of the bad ones, the good…
Don’t call me a warrior. I served, but I’m not a goddamn warrior. Neither are all the loudmouths that your warrior talk is for. Yeah, I know the “warrior” stuff is for the Trump cult and not the janitors, nurses, doctors, orderlies, cashiers, stock clerks, drivers, and others who expose themselves every day to the…