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I’m neither an economist nor an historian, but I know enough about Marx to know that none of the governments that have been established in his name followed Marx’s theories. Suffice to say that Marx taught that socialism—and eventually communism—would arise in mature capitalist economies, when the workers got tired of labor exploitation and overthrew their capitalist overlords. Marx believed that the nations most ripe for this revolution in his time were Germany and the UK. Marx was long dead by the time Lenin and the Bolsheviks claimed his mantle in the 1917 Russian Revolution. To resolve the paradox of how a Marxist revolution is legitimate in a predominantly agrarian pre-industrial society, Lenin et al. sidestepped this inconvenience by proclaiming “socialism in one country.” IOW, socialism because we say so. Of course, the West was happy to accept the re-branding as a way of alienating Marxist economics for its workers. In 1949, Mao and his cadre came to power in China, branding hi...

As a Roman Catholic kid in the ‘60s, I took piano lessons from an Israeli pianist. On a couple of occasions, I was enlisted to perform in Youth Aliyah concerts at the local synagogue. These were fund-raising events to send kids to Israel. At the time, I had no understanding of the Zionist project in Israel. It was only many decades later that I learned that both of my paternal grandparents were born in the Pale of Settlement and immigrated to the US (not to Israel) from Ukraine in the first decade of the 20 th  century. It turns out that the intersection between Christianity and Zionism long antedates my personal experience. “ The idea of gathering the world’s Jews in their mythical homeland was advanced by evangelical Christians centuries before it was taken up by secular Jews at the end of the 19 th   century.  However, religious Jews and the most distinguished Jewish scholars long   opposed   the idea of a Jewish state, especially one in the Holy Land —migrat...

The Trumpenproletariat loves to point to those who disagree with Dear Leader as having Trump Derangement Syndrome. But like everything they accuse others of, it’s what they’re guilty of. “ A week ago I   asked   whether global energy markets have “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I was being a bit arch because I didn’t mean in the sense that MAGA world means, which is being somehow obsessively, compulsively anti-Trump. I meant the opposite. Are the markets wedded to a kind of Trump magical thinking? ” In other words, those who blindly trust that Trump has a plan and knows what he’s doing are the ones deranged, particularly in light of his long and growing record of failure. “ To be clear, the best or most generous interpretation of this is TACO, a phrase that started on Wall Street: Trump Always Chickens Out. The idea being that whatever he   says , Trump knows when one of his ideas is going seriously sideways and he moves quickly to pull the plug. And the tariff story does t...

“ Donald Trump has said that the US will hold off on striking Iranian energy sites for five days after “productive” talks with Tehran, hours before his 48-hour ultimatum to Tehran was due to expire.     “The US president said that Washington and Tehran had held conversations about “a complete and total resolution of hostilities” in the past two days, with talks to continue “throughout the week.” Objectively a good thing. I'm glad Trump chickened out. I hope the threats abate. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iran-us-war-live-oil-trump-deadline-israel-strait-of-hormuz-b2943544.html?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=editorial-push  

I was on a Facebook thread recently questioning why kids should be *required* to learn cursive these days. I was casting around for an analogy to illustrate both the fact that cursive *could* have utility and acknowledging that in the third decade of the 21st century, it is an anachronism.     One example is reading a clock face. Most kids these days don't even own a watch--they use their cell phones to tell time. Most clocks today are digital--for example, the ones in our microwave oven and our radiant heat oven. But I wear a clock face watch. I learned expressions like "quarter after" and "quarter till" that reflect having learned how to read a clock face, what some have called “cursive time.” I wouldn't advocate forcing all kids to learn how to read a clock face, although I can testify to its utility.   Another example that came to my mind was driving a manual transmission car. When I was growing up, my parents only had stick shifts, so I learned on that....

I’ve had Iranian colleagues throughout my faculty career. Unsurprisingly, none were anti-American.   Here’s an interview with Juan Cole and  Mojtaba Mahdavi, two Middle East experts, on the current events in Iran. They discuss the politics in Iran and among the Iranian diaspora. Both Cole and Mahdavi point to the Netanyahu ambition of hegemony in the Middle East as a major driver of current events. I encourage you to listen to the whole thing, but as a teaser, Prof. Cole compares the likelihood that the late Shah’s son will come to power after the current war to the rumors that the Tsar’s daughter Anastasia had somehow escaped Bolshevik Russia and would reclaim the throne there. Mahdavi and Cole cut through the bothsidesisms of the MSM and the propaganda of the US and Israeli administrations to articulate the nuance and diversity of Iranian public opinion, the impact of Islamophobia as a driver of war propaganda and Western orientalist discourse and the retreat into colonialis...