by Mark Franke I spent my entire professional career in higher education administration, eventually rising to a senior position. I used to be proud of that. No more. The lofty goals of college study, such as free inquiry and critical thinking, were things we challenged our incoming freshmen to take as their own. Now this Olympian-like quest for well-formed knowledge and liberal mindedness (liberal here being with a small “l”) has become a marble man, a statue, rather…

THERE’S A CERTAIN TYPE of councilman — you will recognize him once described — who wants to be someone else. Don’t get me wrong, these are men and woman of some accomplishment in their profession. It’s just that . . . well, they’ve always wanted to be a banker, a developer or some other captain of their own ship. That is a human failing too common to judge. At one time all of us fall…

by Richard McGowan, Ph.D. “I have always been a believer in truth. Palliatives are harmful.  One must have the courage to face reality. Without that courage, life is meaningless.  The people who do us the most harm are the people who shield us from reality.” — Agatha Christie, Murder in Retrospect, p.150 When President Donald Trump was elected my hope was that people would do their own research on various claims made by politicians and…

by Leo Morris A reader commenting on my column about nimrods from Podunk emailed that he appreciates a little context with his news, “a concept that seems to be an endangered species.” Numbers are just numbers, he wrote. “Data should always be presented in context. Context can make the difference between truth/fact and honesty.” Anecdotes offered as proof of an argument could also use a little context to bridge the fact-to-honesty gap. I was thinking…

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” — George Orwell, “1984” I HAD THE IMPRESSION during my time on Capitol Hill, a supposed center of representative government, that…

POST-RIOT LIFE in our town is divided into the factions that a historian predicted more than 70 years ago, and we will be lucky to survive when they finally clash. Granted, nobody reads Arnold Toynbee any more. He is a bit thick, as British scholars tend to be, but his 10-volume magisterial study of the rise and fall of more than 60 civilizations put him on the cover of Time Magazine. In short, he knows stuff. Here are some of Toynbee’s…

by Mark Franke John Adams is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Founding Fathers; he gets no respect. That is an exaggeration but not by much. He was, at the same time, one the most intellectual of the Founding Fathers and no doubt the most ill-tempered. It seems he just couldn’t help being irascible, given to moodiness and bouts of brooding. Because of his superior intelligence, he could think easily at the conceptual level so why…

by Leo Morris Sooner or later, every political columnist quotes George Santayana, and this is my week. If you have a problem with that, then go back to Podunk with the other nimrods. That was probably a bad way to begin. Some readers might take offense. Let me start over. “Podunk” was a common insult when I was growing up, and it generally meant a dull, insignificant place, a cultural backwater where nothing ever happened.…

by Paul Harvey and Lisa Conyers Our book, “Welfare for the Rich,” is designed to inform Americans — especially taxpayers who are footing most of the bill — about the massive movement of money from millions of middle- and lower-income Americans to much wealthier people and corporations that do not need and should not be entitled to these favors. What’s most remarkable about these policies is their variety and ubiquity. While today’s politicians — especially…

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld answering a question at a 2002 press briefing AT A CERTAIN AGE you should be getting used to the generation gap, overlapping…