Month: April 2020

This story is mostly true.  I had a conversation with an eighth-grader I have known since her first day on the planet.  She is the product of a very expensive and very progressive private-school education. It wasn’t exactly the Patrice Lumumba Day Care Center followed by the Che Guevara Elementary School followed by the Saul Alinsky Middle School but it might as well have been.  Jody and I share jokes.  She is very adept at the language and we both appreciate pun-based humor. Any joke is funnier when it includes the cleaver use of the language. There is a double payoff, assuming…

The nomenclature around economic philosophies can be confusing.   On the right, there are variations on the theme of free markets.  Adam Smith was the progenitor of classic liberalism which advocated for largely unencumbered markets as the principal means of producing goods and services.  Leftists, on the other hand, will debate the difference between communism and socialism, and, drilling down, between old-style socialism and democratic socialism.  Karl Marx is our chief progenitor here, advocating for a collectivist means of production run by a collectivist authority.  Obviously, this short paragraph does not adequately explain The Wealth of Nations and Das Capital.   …

The structural rules for haikus are quite simple: exactly three lines of poetry with the middle line fixed at seven syllables and the first and third lines fixed at five syllables each.  Rhyming is neither required nor expected but neither is it precluded.  The heart of the haiku is a bit more complicated.  The object of the exercise is to capture, within the constraints of the structure, the essence of something; almost anything.   The subject might be a vision, an emotion, a flower, an attitude, a political position or an experience.  A haiku might relay a message, offer a compliment…