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The  quote "Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society,"  (is  attributed to U.S. Supreme Court Justice  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. As we enter the 2026 IRS filing season, you may be treated to the libertarian* propaganda that taxes are just government stealing. In a representative democracy such as ours, the majority has authorized the imposition of taxes in order to pay for the services we enjoy (the military, roads and bridges, the legal system, etc). Of course, Republican borrow-and-spend policies have long ago outstripped the ability of taxes to pay for the government services that Republicans demand (military invasions of sovereign countries, ICE occupations of American cities, Trump golf excursions). That said, we do have taxation with representation in the US, and a casual comparison reveals a general trend of high taxes/GDP ratio correlated with a high democracy score. So the data seem to support Holmes. *Libertarianism is the apotheosis of solipsism,...

“We talked about this a little. We talked about this back in our Senate days,” Vance revealed, later adding how “all of us put the tinfoil hat on from time to time.” He’s running for president in 2028, peeps. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jd-vance-aliens-demons-devil_n_69c93d9de4b0a014076f69bb?origin=home-latest-news-unit

When I retired, my health insurance became traditional Medicare, what right-wingers call “socialism.” I’d read enough not to be seduced by the candy offered in “Medicare Advantage” plans, the free market plans that were supposed to be superior to traditional Medicare. So far, no regrets for me. Sadly, tens of thousands of Americans do regret the Medicare Advantage choice. “ At 70, landscape artist Anthony J. Petchkis lives with a host of health problems. There was the heart attack that sent him on an ambulance ride from his home in the mountains of New Hampshire to Portland, Maine, for   an arterial stent. His cholesterol is stubbornly high. He has diabetes, gout and rheumatoid arthritis. He takes eight medications a day.   “Until this year, he at least felt confident insurance would fully cover his medical bills, which he estimates run to   several thousands of dollars a year. Then his Medicare Advantage plan dropped him.   “How am I going to pay all these things go...

A couple days ago , Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) called Social Security a 'forced retirement program' and said workers' payroll contributions should be gambled on Wall Street. My senator, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) proposed adjusting the payroll wage cap so that people making over $400K per year begin paying their fair share — a "win-win." Let’s take each of these in turn: 1. No, Social Security is *not* a retirement program. It is retirement insurance. Retirement programs include such things as 403b and 403c plans, 401k plans, IRAs and personal savings. In all these plans, money is invested in the name of the person to become available to that person upon retirement. There is no personal Social Security account for each worker. Social Security is a pay-go program, where current workers are paying the benefits of current retirees (pace the Trust Fund).  For many Americans, Social Security is the only thing keeping them from living under a bridge eating cat food. Yes,...

The ammosexual response to the epidemic of gun-related deaths in t he US is that you can’t blame the guns, it’s the people. We should just put up with a level of gun violence far higher than any other industrialized nation. But then what about drugs? Using the same ammosexual logic, narcosexuals should point out that drugs don’t kill people, people kill people. Accordingly, we should relax drug laws and make narcotics freely available to everyone over the age of 21. It’s the price of freedom, right?   https://www.foreignaffairs.com/mexico/can-mexico-avoid-confrontation-united-states?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=fatoday&utm_campaign=The%20Stunning%20Failure%20of%20Iranian%20Deterrence&utm_content=20260319&utm_term=A

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich died on March 13 th . His 1968 book “The Population Bomb” was both influential and controversial in its time and has proven to be better fiction than science since then. I was required to read The Population Bomb in college. I recall being beguiled by its arguments and probably too by the stature of its author. Over the decades, I’ve come to appreciate the value of prophecies like those of Ehrlich; they are specific enough that, if we live long enough, we can see if they come to pass. If they do, the prophet is validated. If they don’t, he is discredited. In the case of Ehrlich, he was massively and conclusively discredited by events that followed. “. . .    in 1970 he forecast that within the coming decade “100-200 million people per year will be starving to death” and “by 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people”. Furthermore, by 1980 the life expectancy of the avera...

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...

While crowing about how it’s sinking the Iranian economy, the Trump Administration is literally keeping it afloat. “ In the coming days, we may unsanction the Iranian oil that’s on the water,” Bessent said on Fox Business Thursday. The US is already allowing Iranian oil to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and that nation has about 140 million barrels afloat now, the Treasury chief said.” While claiming that Iran was an existential threat to US national security in order to justify its war/not war/excursion, the reality is that the real existential threat is to the political future of the Trump GOP. Yes, I realize that only 20% of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz on a good day, and only a fraction of that is Iranian oil. But if you ask the average American, they have no idea about the impact of the war on exports of fertilizer, aluminum or helium. They only understand the price at the pump, and that’s what’s got Trump on the run. https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/en...

I posted earlier about my interest in whether higher oil prices would favor freight trains over trucks. Now, not only is the Trump administration driving up fuel prices, it’s also cutting truck drivers. “About 200,000 immigrant truck drivers - virtually all of them in the U.S. legally - will begin losing their commercial driver's licenses under a Trump administration rule taking effect Monday. “The rule, which will bar many noncitizens from getting new commercial licenses or renewing existing ones, creates challenges for the trucking industry, already struggling with high fuel costs and high driver turnover, according to The Washington Post. Existing licenses will continue to be valid until they expire. “Among those affected are asylum seekers, refugees and DACA recipients.” No, 200,000 manly-man White Americans aren’t going to suddenly materialize to drive these trucks. There’s a reason they were hiring immigrants. You know who gets hurt by this? Middle class and working-class con...

For the past couple of decades, whenever oil prices spiked, I wondered if this would be good news for railroads. Trains in Europe are still very much a thing, and I’ve traveled by train in England, France, Germany and Spain. There are rail connections from Providence to Boston and to New York City. Of particular interest to me, though, is the economics freight rail vs semi tractor trailers. It seems to me that freight trains should be a more efficient use of petroleum, albeit trucks can travel to more places. Last fall, I noticed a bunch of trees that had been chopped down next to what I had assumed were disused railroad tracks near the Ten Mile River Bikeway where I walk every other day. A few days later, I saw a half dozen freight cars pulled by a Providence & Worcester locomotive pass by. This morning, I saw a short set of freight cars pulled Providence & Worcester engine headed Northeast, and thirty minutes later, the same train was traveling the other direction. I don’t kn...

Saint Louis University has a phased retirement program for tenured faculty with sufficient time in service. For up to five years, a qualifying faculty can drop to 70%, 50% or 33% effort, with a commensurate reduction in compensation. They can start at 70% or 50% and drop to a lower level, but they can’t go up to a higher level. Part of the contract is that by the end of the five-year period, the faculty fully retires. This isn’t institutional magnanimity. It’s a kind of buy-out. Indeed, the university has offered tenured faculty buy-outs now and then: quit now, and you walk away on day one with a full year of compensation. These are ways of off-loading tenured faculty who can’t otherwise be fired except for cause.  I took the phased retirement, mostly because I wasn’t emotionally ready to quit cold turkey. And I stayed at 70% of my last pre-phase compensation the entire time, which netted far more money than the buy-out. At the end of the five years, I was ready to be unemployed/re...

Monday evening, we went out to the East Providence library to hear a trio of folk musicians perform (mostly) Celtic music. The instruments included guitar, 5-string banjo, fiddle, harp and bodhran. The performers played both tunes and songs, balancing all the instruments well. The harp was a special highlight; my only beef was that as a Celtic band with a harp, they didn’t play anything by Turlough O’Carolan. In addition to Irish and Scottish melodies, they referenced music from Appalachia and Cape Breton. All three musicians have some Irish background, and the music was interspersed with stories. While the guitar player was re-tuning, the harpist told a couple jokes. This is the one I remember: Joe picks up the morning paper and finds his obituary in it. Shocked, he calls his friend Mick on the phone. “Mick, my obituary is in the paper this morning!” Mick says: “Yeah, I saw that. Where are you calling from? 

A major bulwark protecting the US economy has been that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Now, Trump’s “excursion” (don’t say “war”) is looking to change that. “ A senior Iranian official has told CNN that Tehran is considering allowing a limited number of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz — but only if cargo is traded in Chinese yuan, not US dollars. The condition, if formalised, would represent the most significant challenge to the petrodollar system in its fifty-two-year history, striking at the financial architecture that underpins American global power rather than at US military assets.” *snip* “ What makes the Iranian proposal structurally significant is not simply that it challenges the dollar — de-dollarisation rhetoric has circulated for years without materialising into meaningful change. What is different here is the mechanism. Tehran is not merely proposing that some bilateral trade occur in yuan. It is proposing that access to the world’s most critical ener...

I registered for the draft as a high school senior during the Vietnam war. At the time, you registered at 18, your lottery number was assigned at 19, and you were drafted at 20 if your number was low enough. In the event (a) my number was high enough that I wouldn’t get drafted and (b) the draft ended by the time I turned 20. The Vietnam War was very much a shaping event for me. By the time I was a postdoc, I embarked on a project of learning history the history of war that began with Stanley Karnow’s book “Vietnam.” Eventually, I realized I couldn’t understand the Vietnam war without understanding the Cold War, I couldn’t understand the Cold War without understanding WWII, and I couldn’t understand WWII without understanding WWI. 40 years and over 200 histories and biographies later, I’m still filling in gaps in my understanding of history and how it informs the present. I just finished “McNamara at war: A new history” by  Philip and William Taubman. McNamara, as JFK’s and LBJ’s S...

Now, Trump is threatening to double down on his Iran disaster. “President Donald J. Trump   threatened Friday   to destroy Iran’s major oil terminal on Kharg Island if Tehran continued to obstruct shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.” Trump fancies himself as a deal-maker. Any deal-maker who can bankrupt a casino is a fool. This latest threat is foolish on stilts. Ca. 90% Iran’s oil ships out of Kharg. If that terminal is destroyed, it will effectively cut off all oil income to Iran. Trump apparently thinks either (a) Iran will cave at the threat or (b) he can in will carry out the threat and only Iran will pay the price. Trump has forgotten the Samson Option. “Iran, having been deprived of its livelihood at Kharg, will take down the oil facilities of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. It has the drones and missiles to do so. Oil is, to say the least, flammable. So it can be done. As we saw in Kuwait after the Gulf War, when Iraqi troops set oil rig fires in Kuwait, they are...

I get it. As a parent, I had a claim to the supervision of my minor child. And I wouldn’t deprive any other parent of the rights I expect.   But your rights end where my nose begins.  If your parental rights mean dictating the public-school curriculum my child is taught, you need to find a private school. If your parental rights entail exposing my child to your unvaccinated child, you need to find a private school or home-school. If your parental rights mean recruiting the nanny state to teach your backward religion, you need to find a private school or home-school. You have rights, but so do I. I’m fortunate in that my daughter is an adult and a parent herself, so these issues no longer affect me personally. And I live in an enlightened state, where right-wing extremism masquerading as “parental rights” has no purchase. But as an American, I still care about how my tax money is spent, and I don’t want it spent to advance intolerance. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/the-nex...

The de facto closing of the Strait of Hormuz resulting from Trump’s little war impacts supply chains besides transportation. “ Farmers in the U.S. and Canada, who were already worried about prospects for another year of low profits or losses, now could have spring planting disrupted as they struggle to find fertilizer, ‌and prices for any available supplies have spiked more than a third since the war in Iran paralyzed global trade. “ The U.S., ‌which in some years imports half of its urea fertilizer, is about 25% short of the usual supplies that farmers buy for spring planting, according to The Fertilizer Institute, ​which represents the U.S. fertilizer supply chain. “Supplies could grow still scarcer if fertilizer destined for the U.S. gets rerouted to other places willing to pay more for it, an analyst said.” And with each passing week, Spring planting season looms closer. That’s not something you can just put off for a few months and then kick into gear. Most fertilizer needs to be ...

Vaccines have proven efficacy and public health value over billions of doses and, in many cases, decades of experience world-wide. And yet, the Secretary of HHS insists on calling into question vaccine safety. Yet under his nose, Americans are experimenting with unproven and potentially dangerous peptide injections. “Here’s a new trend that sounds unwise: buying unregulated substances from dealers in foreign countries and injecting them into your body.   “And yet, grey-market injectable peptides – a category of substances with obscure, alphanumeric names like BPC-157, GHK-Cu, or TB-500 – have developed a devoted following among biohackers and health optimizers.   “Across platforms like Discord and Telegram, users are   claiming   these peptides help with everything from injury recovery, athletic performance, weight loss, mental function, better sleep and younger-looking skin.” Look, semaglutides are peptides and, after considerable testing and experience have been sh...

There were few if any Chinese students in my college classes and none in my graduate program. There was only one Chinese postdoc in the lab where I did postdoctoral training, and no Chinese grad students. But two of the four grad students who started in my department when I started as a faculty in 1987 were Chinese. Ultimately, I trained three Chinese PhD students and two Chinese postdocs in my lab. There was one Chinese faculty at the time I started, although he was from Taiwan. Today, 3 of the 18 faculty are Chinese.  China has been sending some of their best and brightest students for decades, and they represent a major reservoir of US-trained scientific talent. But Trump’s attacks on science, federal research and research universities threatens this investment in human capital. On the other hand, China is expanding its commitment to scientific research. “The Chinese government is ramping up its support for science, announcing plans to boost two key budgets at the country’s bigg...

Much is being made of the probable consequences of Trump’s Iran war for the US economy and the midterm elections. And “it’s the economy, stupid” still describes the dominant consideration in the minds of American voters. But to the extent that foreign policy affects the ballot box, the fact that Trump’s invasion is a proxy war for the Netanyahu regime in Israel could also be a factor in November. Here, the distinction seems less along party lines than the willingness of candidates to apply the standard of national interest to military intervention. Both major parties in America have mostly stood by Israel, even as its policy of violent apartheid against Palestinians has intensified. As Democrats try to figure out how to exploit the disaster that the Trump GOP has become, they’ll need to come clean on the blank-check policy towards Israel. “ PARTY OFFICIALS TOLD ME they think Democratic voters will be motivated in the upcoming elections to back candidates who feel authentic—candidates w...

The justifications for the war on Iran were kind of a dog’s breakfast. Among those mentioned were regime change and unconditional surrender, which promised a long commitment and boots on the ground. Looks like the stock market and oil prices got through to Cadet Bone Spurs. “What this all comes down to is that the White House is running as fast as it can from regime change and even faster from its demand for “unconditional surrender”. Trump wants to be done because the conflict is getting too messy, Gulf allies are certainly privately asking WTAF Trump’s plan is and more than anything else Trump is realizing that he is triggering what has been the most reliable presidency killer in American politics for more than half a century: spiking gas prices.” https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-now-moonwalking-away-from-regime-change-as-fast-as-he-can

  If you don't want to get vaccinated and your don't want your kids to get vaccinated, that's on you. But don't be surprised if the rest of us don't want to suffer from your bad judgement. You have no right to inflict the consequences of your bad decisions on others. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1259384362680113

Within the first couple years of my joining the faculty of Saint Louis University, a Jesuit Catholic University, my chairman asked me to attend a dinner sponsored by the Jesuits. The goal of the dinner was for the Jesuits to assess the Jesuit mission at the School of Medicine. After dinner, we were each asked to introduce ourselves. One after the other, the faculty said they had attended Jesuit universities and/or medical schools and asserted that that experience conferred a special concern for ethics and morality that they carried since. I was the only member of the party that, while having been raised Roman Catholic, only trained in secular universities. I told everyone that I felt my training also prepared me for a moral and ethical life, and I couldn’t discern anything unique about the morality of Saint Louis University faculty. After I went home, I pondered this idea and came up with an experimental test. Over the 40-year span of the Tuskegee syphilis study, there must have been h...

TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) was coined to describe Trump’s flip-flops on tariffs, but he’s flip-flopped on other notorious threats. “The Trump administration plans to abandon its defense of the president’s executive orders sanctioning several law firms, according to people familiar with the matter.   “The Justice Department as soon as Monday was expected to drop its appeals of four trial-court rulings that struck down President Trump’s actions against law firms Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, and Susman Godfrey.    “Trump issued a string of  executive orders last year  against several law firms and individual lawyers that would have stripped security clearances, restricted their access to federal buildings and directed agencies to end any federal contracts with the firms and their clients.   “The White House campaign sent a chill through the industry. Fear of the orders also prompted other large firms  to make deals with the presiden...

In the ancient world, people saw signs and portents in eclipses, weather and earthquakes. The God(s) must be trying to tell them something, they believed. By the beginning of the 20 th  century, educated people should have abandoned such primitivism. And most did. But reality, facts and evidence continue to confound evangelical Christians.   “Hagee’s blood moon prophecies have become enormously popular in evangelical circles. The Christian Broadcasting Network   cited   them this week in its coverage of the war. An “ analysis ” the network published on its website acknowledged that the blood moons might be a coincidence, but that “doesn’t mean there also wasn’t an intentional message that was pre-ordained from the time God set the sun, moon, and planets in motion in Genesis 1.” The blood moons, along with the war, could be a sign of the end-times.   “Hagee may be the godfather of Iran-related prophecies, but prophets echoing them have become commonplace.   ...