“The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”-Gramsci The etymology of the word “morbid” is the Latin word morbidus meaning disease. Let us consider the particular disease that grips America right now. Students of Germany in the early part of the Great [...]
As regular readers know, it is the continuing obsession of this writer that we are in a really strange period that comes once a century (if that) where the old compass is broken, but new tools for navigating the choppy waters are unfamiliar to the captains of government or industry. Anyone who felt that the [...]
There has been so much nonsense bruited about in the last year about how Barack Obama is secretly pulling America towards socialism. So I’ve got news for Glenn Beck. If you define socialism (as Marx did) as “worker control of the means of production”, then America has been a socialist country for the last 20 [...]
I have a conservative friend, a global warming skeptic, who wrote on his Facebook page this week the following. The pathetic thing about all of this is that we grew up in an America that could do anything. “In fact, we can put a man on the moon.” Now, we look so incapable and pathetic. [...]
This is Jon Gnarr, Iceland’s most famous comedian. Jon got so upset with the financial crisis which has gripped Iceland for the last two years that he decided to run for Mayor of Reyjavik–a position which is often a step towards the Prime Minister position. To do so, he trademarked the name “The Best Party” [...]
I have taken a good bit of criticism from both my left and right whenever I write a supportive post about our President. Many here ask me to remain in “the world of ideas” and drop out of the world of partisan politics. I think this is an impossible request. Bismarck said “politics is the [...]
For the past three years I have been talking to my students about where “relevancy-targeted advertising” was going and especially how Facebook might play a key role in gathering all sorts of personal data on their users to sell to advertisers. It was not until this spring that a significant number of students began to [...]
Everyone keeps asking why Facebook is always tinkering with the privacy settings. The answer comes from a recent Nielson/Facebook survey on the effectiveness of “social advocacy” advertising. Study after study has shown that consumers trust their friends and peers more than anyone else when it comes to making a purchase decision. It’s critical that we [...]
For me, the next three days are going to be like jumping in a time machine and returning to 1957 as Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson muscles through the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. In book Three of Robert Caro’s masterful biography of LBJ, entitled Master of the Senate, we find Johnson ruling over [...]
When I started promulgating this notion of The Interregnum–”The old is dying and the new cannot be born;in this interregnum morbid symptoms abound”(Gramsci)–two years ago, I had no idea how morbid the symptoms would get. The last week has been as depressing culturally and politically as any in my recent memory. On the political front, [...]