In Praise of US Healthcare? All the things happening in this world — ALL THE THINGS — and I spend my morning worrying about Adrian White’s op-ed in Wednesday’s Cape Breton Post. What is wrong with me? It’s not like President-elect Joe Biden — to whom White directs a barrageRead More

“The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve…” Shakespeare, The Tempest   “That’s a dark thinking that I have a hard time understanding…” Marshall Billingslea, President Donald J. Trump’s Special Envoy for Arms Control   On May 15,Read More

Growing up, I had a good friend whose father, a barber, not only cut hair, but helped people who were having problems growing it. I don’t recall when I became aware of the business he ran out of his home because there were no signs posted on the house, andRead More

MAGAA So, this happened: “Make America Great Again, Again?” In case you’ve forgotten, that’s Anthony Marlowe, the Iowa businessman who bought the Sydney Call Centre in 2019. Julia Marlowe is his wife, who has been appointed deputy White House liaison in the US General Services Administration (GSA). Here’s a descriptionRead...

Week two in self-isolation and it’s not been bad at all. Haven’t run out of the necessities, food and TP specifically, and, thanks to our provider, am grateful not to have to join the masses who seem programmed to get right out there and ignore the warnings they are hearingRead More

I’ve speculated about it going over budget and falling behind schedule, but it never occurred to me that a virus — more specifically, a novel coronavirus called COVID-19 — would pose the biggest threat to the timely opening of the CBRM’s $20 million second cruise ship berth, but here weRead More

Never one to suffer subtlety gladly, or overpolish the written word, US President Donald J. Trump on January 3 ‘spoke’ to the world by tweet: an American flag, behind which, we soon learned, lay the body of Iranian General Qassam Suleimani (and seven other human beings), assassinated by drone inRead More

The law I am signing today provides $738 billion – that’s with a “B”. That’s an all-time record. … That brings our total investment in national defense, since my inauguration, to almost two and a half trillion dollars. And what’s the good of a budget if you don’t have theRead More

In the atomic age, who needs the four horsemen of the apocalypse – pestilence, war, famine, and death – when one will do? In mid-October, North Korean ‘Supreme Leader’ Kim Jong-un rode a white horse up a snow-peaked mountain, gazing from the summit with a “mien” so “dignified” – inRead More

To set the tone for their recent article on Twenty-First Century Nuclear Deterrence , four senior American nuclear war-planners approvingly quote from Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling’s classic 1966 defense of ‘coercive diplomacy’ in the atomic age: The power to hurt – the sheer unacquisitive, unproductive power to destroy thingsRead More