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Guns in America: Rights vs. Control
In the wake of the Connecticut shootings Nate Silver (NYTimes) has an intersting column about America’s “conversation” on guns as it is reported in the media. Here’s the core finding: If the news...
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The Newtown Tragedy and the Emperor’s New Clothes
We’ll get to that fairly tale in a minute, for it embodies a deep truth about living in society. But let’s first think about guns. That gun ownership has been such a controversial issue in American...
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The Great State of Northern Virginia
The USofA is too tightly connected. More states would help: Competitive federalism has many advantages. Citizens can move to communities that better reflect their preferences for public goods, they...
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City Diplomacy - Organisation - City, Diplomacy, Sponsorship, UCLG,...
Seems a bit like C. Keil’s Global Organization of Democracies. Founded in May 2004, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) is the united voice and world advocate of democratic local...
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The Green Movement isn’t fringe! – Salon.com
Environmentalism has become mainstream. Time to acknowledge and act like it. But here’s the thing that Grunwald and wannabe Very Serious People need to remember: The vast majority of environmentalists...
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Preventing an Arctic Cold War – NYTimes.com
Several countries, along with corporations like ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, are preparing to exploit the [Arctic] region’s enormous oil and natural gas reserves. New shipping routes will compete...
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The Pope and the Dalai Lama
Have they ever met, the Pope and the Dalai Lama? I’m sure that many individual Roman Catholics and many individual Tibetan Buddhists have met. Perhaps some are neighbors and tend flower gardens...
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Simon Johnson: Big Banks Have a Big Problem – NYTimes.com
Attorney General Eric Holder’s testimony to Congress last week also confirmed the latter point: some banks are so big that the Department of Justice is afraid to bring legal charges against them, for...
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Well-off people soon to finally be inconvenienced by sequestration – Salon.com
Sequestration has now hit air travel, with 10% of our air-traffic controllers being furloughed every day. And that means flights are being delayed all over the place. I am guessing that over the next...
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How I Found a Home in Jersey City and Got Steve Fulop Elected Mayor, Part 2
By the end of the first part of this essay I’d made my way to Jersey City and bought a point-and-shoot camera. Jersey City was where I lived, but not my home. I had no home, unless it would be the...
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How I Found a Home in Jersey City and Got Steve Fulop Elected Mayor, Part 3
When the second installment ended I was photographing graffiti and had started volunteering in the Hamilton Park Neighborhood Association. There I found out that Janice Monson, who taught in the Jersey...
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I Want to Be a Mayor – NYTimes.com
Smaller is better. In fact, if you want to be an optimist about America today, stand on your head. The country looks so much better from the bottom up — from its major metropolitan areas — than from...
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How to Really End Mass Incarceration – NYTimes.com
This is a start, but let’s wait and see. Starting in the 1970s, a domestic “war on crime” dominated by antidrug policies and racial profiling fueled a prison-building binge that is morally — and now...
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Dear Ron and Dennis: For the sake of the planet and your great-grandkids,...
Charlie first wrote this in the Spring of 2012. A year plus later it makes even more sense for liberals and libertarians to make common cause in stopping wars, celebrating self-determination of...
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Virtual Feudalism is Here: the 1% vs. the 99%
Over at Crooked Timber they’re having a discussion of the software SNAFU that’s occurred in the rollout of Obamacare. As anyone in the software biz knows, that’s just how it is with large software...
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Civics 101: The Basis of Democracy
We all know these words, from the opening of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by...
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Anger Growing Among Allies Over U.S. Surveillance – NYTimes.com
You know, there’s a sense in which “WE” all knew that this was going on. But it’s one thing to strongly suspect – in a sophisticated, knowing – way that this is going on. It’s something else to put it...
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Jersey City Future: the Twilight Zone
I’ve been feeling that there’s something afoot in Jersey City, but I don’t know quite what. For example, here’s an empty block in Lafayette as it was two years ago (August 10, 2011): Here’s the same...
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Extra! Extra! Japanese Government Funds Distance Education on the Rez
No, it hasn’t happened yet. But who knows, stranger things have happened. By “the rez” I mean, of course, the reservation. In this case I have no particular reservation in mind but rather am thinking...
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