Category Archives: The dismal science

The Making of the MAGA Right

As the old baseball saying goes, sometimes “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.”  This became especially true since Curt Flood opened the floodgates to free agency more than fifty years ago when he refused to be treated as disposable property by the owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, one August A. Busch, Jr.  […]

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How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System

Upon reading this collection of essays (the title of this post) from Wolfgang Streeck and then contemplating our current world, The Second Coming of William Butler Yeats comes to mind: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon […]

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Politics, Government, and Science During Pandemic Times

When asked in early 2000 how long I thought COVID-19 would last, I answered three years.  Alas, it has now been nearly six years since a frightening respiratory disease was first noticed in Hubei Province centered in Wuhan.  Retrospective analyses indicate the virus was already circulating in other parts of the world.  It soon became […]

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