There is a traffic problem in this country. What, you've already heard?

 Well, it's a bigger deal than most of y'all area ready to believe. How about these two sets of numbers:
-- In 2010, only 439 urban areas traffic problems caused 4.8 billion additional travel hours and was… Read full post »

"...man doth not live by bread only...."

Sometimes we humans forget what we are. By this I don't mean, as some might suppose from the foregoing quotation, that we are all God's creatures; nor do I mean that we are rational creatures or any other thing except this: we are primates. And this… Read full post »

More than four years ago, I joined a little email debate about what was wrong with the music industry, and went a little crazy. I thought of this five year old debate this evening after a conversation with my teenager who was complaining about the paucity of "good" on the airwaves,… Read full post »

I've been doing some reading lately in areas that are new to me, causing me to think about familiar things in a different way. Haven't stretched my mind quite so much in years, actually, and the results will be echoing for a while.

Right now, it has occurred to me that… Read full post »

Reading the fiction of a society can tell you a lot about where it is, and where it is going. No new insight there, true so many times that there is nothing new to be learned. Let's just move along, shall we?

Ours is one sick society. No news there, either, but… Read full post »

Sometimes all it takes is proper perspective to see where the equities lie in any given situation. Take the U.S. and global economies, for example.

The institutions that "make the world go 'round" as the song would have it (the bankers, jobbers and thieves) got all the help they needed to… Read full post »

Those (few, I think) who have read more than one entry in this blog may be of the opinion that I share the liberal bias prevalent on OS. I wish life were that simple. To the extent that there is a liberal philosophy, I don't know what it is; nor do… Read full post »

This title was inspired by an idiotic radio conversation I heard last week between two bigshots; but ut could just as easily have been titled "Of Human Agency" or "Humanity, Protagonist." The best way to capture in one sentence what I am about to write is this: "It is remarkable the… Read full post »

Among the many tributes to Senator Ted Kennedy that I have seen, heard and read in the days since his death, there is one bit of quiet work that has gone entirely unmentioned. My purpose here is to not only commemorate it, but also to argue that like so many of… Read full post »

Sitting here atching the late shows, and seeing all the jokes about the White House meeting Obama hosted between Skip Gates and  Jim Crowley -- inspired me. The punchlines seem to be variying between faux outrage over the fact that the three brews chosen by the three are the product of fore… Read full post »

The concept behind this post is quite simple: if a word does not appear in a text, it is not there; and in anything written with care, most probably does not appear by design.

Just caught a few U.S. Senators arguing that the founders of the United States of America absolutely… Read full post »

I'm painfully accustomed to the talking heads on television not knowing what they are talking about. Yeah, yeah, I know, no surprise. But words, well..., shouldn't people who talk for a living know what they mean?

 I ask this because the other day on television I heard Lou Dobbs decry the "… Read full post »

Saw a bunch of ads for the new internet search site: Bing. I was intrigued by most of the visuals in the ad, but horrified by the tagline. Then again, knowing who approved the tagline, I was far from suprised.

Not content with it's near monopoly on the operating system market… Read full post »

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

For those of you who don't remember, that's a line deliverd by Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park. The film grossed a lot of money, and had several adrenaline/… Read full post »

Already the Ayn Rand folks and National Review types are beginning to scream about Obama's plans to ration health care. After all, they argue, how else can we cut government spending on health care while expanding access?

 First, all those nunbnuts either DO NOT KNOW or are WILLFULLY IGNORING Ob… Read full post »

Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States, just lied in his first press conference. This was compounded by the misleading statement he made twice related to the truth he would not reveal.

In the second question, Obama was asked about Iran and his plans for diplomacy with that… Read full post »

A few years ago, a thoughftul and insightful friend made a comment to me. "The problem is," he said, "in our society, no one is willing to die for anything." We talked about it over breakfast, and I suppose the comment has been hanging out in a subprocessor in my brain… Read full post »

Etymology is the study of words. Today's word is: epiphenomenal.

Definition: "A secondary phenomena that is caused by and accompanies another phenomenon."

 Marx thought that politics was epiphenomenal, that what actually drove decisions was the interest of the capitalist class. He pointed t… Read full post »

In order to make myself more understandable, allow me a brief detour into the only Hillary Clinton joke I have ever told.

 Back in the 90s, Limo One stops for gas in Chicago, and lo! and behold the attendant is a guy Hillary went to high school with.  They chat… Read full post »

Since we first learned of a guy named Joe-the-Plumber, John McCain has made the case that his opponents' goal is "to spread the wealth around. Obama is more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than he is about growing the pie."

Such is the pablum peddled by folks… Read full post »

As the election approaches, and with it the selection of the successor to our current President, the season of Hallowe'en present an occasion to examine whether there is any basis for the starkly Manichean worldview of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue's outgoing tenant.

 Are there discrete good and evil… Read full post »

That's a phrase I see five days a week on my way into work. From an elevated portion of the train tracks I can see down into a yardstoring all sorts of municipal stuff, like light poles and mobiles jersey barriers. There, in black spary paint on three of these barriers… Read full post »

I will miss some of these, both because I'm so damn mad I can barely think, and because I turned off the debate before I became violent. Still, McCain apparently made the choice that he's going to show that he's more reliable on foreign affairs because he understands things that Barack… Read full post »

No, we haven't missed it yet, the moment when we might have done something truly useful in response to the current economic crisis is fast passing away.

I'm not talking here about whatever the Congress is going to to bail out the banks and whoever else they see fit to prop… Read full post »

With Hurricane Ike about to slam into the Texas coast, as a human being I'd like to offer a little perspective which I hope we can keep in mind as pictures from Ike's destruction come pouring in over the weekend.

(This post was inspired by an op-ed yesterday in the… Read full post »