So I read the other day that when Trump (partially) shutdown the government, he effectively shut down the national parks. The rangers and others who would have otherwise staffed the parks…taking tickets, clearing roads, maintaining bathrooms, providing police services, etc. …were shut out. Thus the parks were left to themselves. But people kept right on…

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money

Late last year, there was an intriguing article in Politico, The Next Koch Doesn’t Like Politics. It seems that the Koch Brothers, the famous “Libertarian” billionaires who have done so much to shatter the American centralist consensus in politics, are growing old. So, increasingly the massive foundations and political networks they’ve created are being transferred…

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So I had an odd thought the other day. I was browsing my own writing, actually, and I ran across my tribute to Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist and pop culture figure who simultaneously challenged many of the assumptions of his own profession, and also remade the public’s conception of what a scientist is all…

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So, I’m looking right now at an article on the Washington Post website, Breaking from GOP orthodoxy, Trump increasingly deciding winners and losers in the economy by Steven Mufson and David J. Lynch. In it, the two writers make the interesting point that Conservatism (at least as that complicated word is defined in the United…

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