Archives
“It Only Happens to Mexicans” (Or How Not to Frame a Critique of the Immigration Policy)
Posted on September 20, 2018 5 Comments
I’ll start off by saying that I like Dan Rodricks. He’s an okay guy. He may be a little hard to follow on some of his arguments, but he generally means well. So I was a little bit surprised to read his latest opinion piece for The Baltimore Sun. In it, he tells us the story […]
Domestic Threats to Public Health in the United States
Posted on April 1, 2018
If you’ve been watching the news, you might have noticed that something interesting is going in Italy. They just had a general election, and their results were very interesting. This is from The Atlantic: “Anyone who’s spent more than a vacation in Italy knows it’s a country with deep reserves of discontent, economic stagnation, and […]
You’re Angry at the Wrong People
Posted on January 27, 2018
It’s very common for xenophobic people to say something like, “Illegals are taking are jobs.” They don’t care if it’s true or not because truth is not the primary aim of the xenophobe or the racist. Their primary aim is to get people angry at undocumented immigrants and then let the hate do the heavy […]
Immigration, Again
Posted on January 16, 2018 1 Comment
Slavery is “America’s Original Sin,” without a doubt. I think the way that the United States governments since Independence have treated immigrants is a close second. Time after time, the country seemed to settle on what being “American” was, and then the country rejected anyone not fitting the description until it was necessary to re-define […]
What Do I Tell My Child?
Posted on July 29, 2017
The podcast This American Life had a very interesting episode the other day. It was called “Fear and Loathing in Homer and Rockville.” The podcast dealt with the topic of immigration when immigration had nothing to do with the problem perceived by the subjects of the podcast. Or, rather, immigration was seen as the cause of […]
To My Most Conservative Friend
Posted on February 14, 2017 2 Comments
My glass is not half full. It’s half empty because I gave the other half of water to someone who was thirsty, just like Jesus would (the Jesus described in the Bible, not the caricature misquoted up on stages of megachurches-slash-concerts). Your glass is half empty because some monster made up in the imagination of Breitbart of Alex Jones or Jenny McCarthy or Andrew Wakefield or Ted Cruz stole your water. Or because you drank it all so no one else could have it.
To Donald Trump, I’m A Criminal
Posted on July 22, 2016 3 Comments
I tried to be objective and read Donal Trump’s nomination acceptance speech instead of listening to him on television. You can sometimes see something on television and misinterpret it for something worse than it seems. So I went over to Politico.com and read their transcript of the speech. All I got from it is that […]
Eating just a little bit better now and then
Posted on April 8, 2016 3 Comments
On the last day of our trip to Italy, my wife and I were sitting at a coffee shop enjoying a very strong and very expensive coffee. As we looked out the front door, we saw a woman with three young boys sitting on a small bridge. (Venice has a lot of bridges.) All three […]
EpidemioLogical 