Sunday was the 40th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre, an event that caused the deaths of about 900 people (about a third of them children) who were killed at the group’s compound in Guyana.
Note that I write “were killed” rather than “killed themselves.” One of the many misconceptions about the Jonestown...
In light of the many destructive fires still burning in California, it might seem like a no-brainer that fires such as these could be made less severe by a more effective and frequent use of controlled burns and selective thinning of the forest and brush. But although that idea appears to...
Late Thursday afternoon Trump gave a speech and then answered questions from the press about policy regarding the caravan of illegal immigrants headed towards the U.S. I listened to it at the time, and here’s the text of his remarks.
After hearing the speech, I wasn’t surprised by the spin given by ...
You hear it everywhere right now: the Republican Party is united as never before.
Mitch McConnell was pretty witty about it: “I want to thank the mob because they’ve done the one thing we were having trouble doing, which was energizing the base.”
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The presumption of innocence for the accused in a criminal trial is one of the main pillars of our criminal law. Its importance to our liberty cannot be overstated.
Yiddish is a language that has a lot of words that express personality qualities and types, particularly loser types or mean types or conniving types. These words often combine humor with rueful sarcasm and cynical realism about the vagaries of the human condition.
The answer to the question in the title might seem obvious, but I think it’s more complicated than most people might think.
Let’s leave out accusers who are telling the truth. I’m interested in the ones who are not. They can have multiple motives; any of these can be combined. Th...
I”m going to let this video clip stand on its own without much further commentary from me. But I think it’s very important to look back at this piece of history from twenty-seven years ago. It was both powerful and prescient:
This post isn’t primarily about Kavanaugh and Ford, although obviously that’s the jumping-off spot. It’s about the larger issues that the controversy reflects, which have to do with the nature of justice.
There are a lot of problems with the Kavanaugh accuser’s story, including the fact that it’s possible that she may be deliberately lying for political reasons.
But even if she’s not purposely lying, there are many problems connected with the phenomenon of memory itself, particularly after all these years.
Yesterday New Hampshire had a primary, and Eddie Edwards won the GOP nomination for the US House of Representatives from the state’s 1st Congressional District:
Eddie Edwards, who was endorsed by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, defeated six Republican opponents in the 1st Congressional District, which covers the eastern half of the state....
Professor Jacobson recently wrote a post about Obama’s recent rhetoric against President Trump.
In giving his speech, Obama was violating the traditional code of behavior for ex-presidents, which was to keep their mouths shut and refrain from criticizing their successors. But no one on earth should be surprised by the fact that...
Last week, I wrote a post on Brazilian election frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes known as the Trump of Brazil. Now comes
Brazil is scheduled to have a general election this October, and this article about the current frontrunner in the Brazilian presidential elections, a man named Jair Bolsonaro, describes him as “far-right” and given to racist and misogynistic utterances:
Michael Anton has caused a furor by suggesting that birthright citizenship is not required by the US Constitution, as Fuzzy Slippers has previously discussed on this blog. Anton is quoted as having said this on Tucker Carlson’s show:
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When I was studying interpersonal communication and how to track an argument or any other verbal exchange, one thing that was very much emphasized was the difference between content and process.
Content is just what it sounds like: the subject matter about which two people (let’s say, a married couple) are talking....
Most people are well aware of the U. S. internment of ethnic Japanese, but it’s apparently a little-known fact that some ethnic Germans residing in the U. S. were detained in camps in this country during both world wars:
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