Columns

Driving while black

Published on Thu, 10/22/2020 - 12:00am

There are bad cops. No doubt. We have seen them on television, as well we should. If most cops were bad, it would be easier: Clean house and hire replacements. Instead, you have men and women trying to do a dan-gerous job and hoping to get to go home and see their families at the end of a shift. They rely on stereotypes to stay alive.

Sowing confusion before an election

Published on Mon, 10/19/2020 - 4:26pm

As you might expect in the final weeks of an election, there seems to be some confusion about what is news, what is manipulation and what is censorship. Let me see if I can help sort things out.

First, there has been a lot of speculation about a much-discussed New York Post story alleging, without much evidence, that Joe Biden’s son Hunter may have arranged for a meeting between his father, then the vice president, and a Ukrainian businessman.

And then there is some confusion about what social media companies owe their audiences when it comes to distributing these stories.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world

Published on Fri, 10/16/2020 - 3:07pm

WASHINGTON — The president and his likely successor are campaigning almost exclusively about domestic matters, including the scarcity of domestic tranquility. Although voters usually wish that foreign policy would not intrude upon their attention, they should notice that the president who will be inaugurated in three months will confront an increasingly disorderly world.

Love thy neighbor — no exceptions

Published on Thu, 10/15/2020 - 4:28pm

Another day of listening to the news telling me I live in a “red” state. 

How could one word define everyone in Montana? I’m a Democrat and I know I’m not the only one. We even elected a Democrat governor and U.S. senator.

I am a clinical psychologist who has been in practice for more than 40 years and I am sickened by the polemical rhetoric flying around our country. 

Are we really people who are unable to think in anything but hard and fast absolutes, who can’t understand subtleties anymore? 

The racists at Princeton grovel

Published on Wed, 10/14/2020 - 12:00am

A news item that surfaces last month proves that what’s said in the confessional should remain a secret.

The dark trade-offs of a fairy tale

Published on Tue, 10/13/2020 - 4:14pm

WASHINGTON — It is symbolic beyond the boundaries of normal political prose that the White House announcement event for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett should also have been (it appears) a super-spreader event for the novel coronavirus. Only a fairy tale would be capable of conveying so many layers of temptation and corruption.

The West’s population grows and churns

Published on Mon, 10/12/2020 - 4:54pm

Ever since 1790, when the U.S. Census started keeping track of such things, the migratory flow of non-Indigenous people within the United States has moved from East to West, into lands they erroneously saw as a blank slate, and not so erroneously as a land rife with natural resources to exploit. 

Americans are still mobile and still moving West, but over time, the trajectory of the human flow has shifted to something more complex, with shifting patterns that sometimes double back unexpectedly. 

Innovation’s secret sauce: freedom

Published on Fri, 10/09/2020 - 4:01pm

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny ...’”

— Isaac Asimov

 

WASHINGTON — Matt Ridley, the British writer, calls himself a “rational optimist,” which today probably strikes many people — their health and finances threatened, their equanimity destroyed by the horrors of close confinement with family members — as an irrational coupling of adjective and noun. Nowadays, cheerfulness can be irritating. Ridley, however, is right.

One church, two leaders

Published on Wed, 10/07/2020 - 12:00am

Pope Francis is not Pope John Paul II.

If Trump loses, it's on Trump

Published on Wed, 10/07/2020 - 12:00am

Joe Biden is a terrible candidate.