OK, here’s your civics quiz for the week. Who said the following? “It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing…
Posts published in “Essays”
I’m glad to see Paul Modic sign his name. Paul Modic said: “What if even Ernie Branscomb decides to go troll for a minute, is that so bad?” Like in what’s so bad about writing…
Monday, April 12, 2004, was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Claud Cockburn, father of other Cockburns — the brothers Alexander, Andrew and Patrick — familiar to readers of the AVA and the CounterPunch…
Imperialism was a loaded word, a most unsavory word, in academia in the U.S. in the 1960s when I wrote a Ph.D. thesis about Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad titled “The Mythology of Imperialism.” I…
There’s much hand-wringing these days about the political polarization of our country. This angst is real and empirically provable in evolving individual state and community laws and regulations and, of course, in the very existence…
That's what freethinkers say when asked to swear to God, as I was asked in a Chicago courtroom in December 1969. I testified that Tom Hayden told me one night during the 1968 Democratic Convention…
A few days from now son Lucas and I will take our seats at the Oakland Coliseum, cheer on the A’s, have a long, last sentimental look around and go home. The stadium is maybe…
They wheeled me into the extremely bright and white operating room early in the morning. “Where’s the robot?” I asked. “That’s the first thing everyone asks,” a nurse said with a laugh. “It’s not here…