Category: US Politics

Crossroads

As the kids say, it’s been a minute. There’s no shortage of subjects to write about but time and energy are finite. I’ll start there. A full-time corporate career and part-time academic pursuits leave little time for writing. The short stories I’m always threatening to publish never measure up. I feel like the long historical…
Buffalo & Voting

We’re tired of mass-killing psychos. I think it’s best not to use their names or refer to the moronic ravings they spew before embarking on their psychopathic journeys. Imagine being one of these crazies. If you’re filled with revulsion within one second of picturing yourself holding a weapon or behind the wheel of a vehicle…
The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

Originally this post was going to be a book review page–one of the many I use as references in Chicago Fog’s essays and other posts. But as I read Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge I realized I had a lot of thoughts on the book, and most of those thoughts were critical. So I wrote this very…
Inflation, Citizen Musk, Dobbs, & Russo-Ukraine War

My plan to post a short reflection every week failed almost immediately. The dual demands of a full-time job and part-time academia meant little time for part-time writing. Nevertheless, I’ll try again. Inflation, Elon Musk buying Twitter, and the leaked first draft opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eclipsed the Russo-Ukraine War in commentariat…
Inflation & Establishment Media

Larry Summers was on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast to discuss the state of the world economy (here is the transcript). It was worth listening to only to hear Klein getting mugged by reality, although he still seemed to want to beleive Covid and Ukraine caused high inflation. Say what you want about Summers, but he admitted he…
SCOTUS Appointment & Russo-Ukraine War

SCOTUS nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearings were mostly uneventful. So far she’s saying what she needs to say to get appointed. She strikes me as a good addition to the Court because I don’t think she’s an extreme judicial activist. She handled the unfair question about the “definition of woman” as well as can…
Ukraine Invasion

Very few people read. Readers make the investment of precious time and energy need a return on that investment. In thinking about this website, I wonder if I’ve had a good sense of what people want to read. I think it’s fiction–but that takes me a long time. And I think it’s essays–but I’m bad about…
Overreaction

It’s October 2021 and the simulation is getting weirder and weirder. Strange how opinion journalists’ inevitable exhortation “we must do something” has become “we must do everything.” In the last 20 years, national rhetoric heated-up faster than temperatures in pre-Millennium climate change projections. In America, there was governmental overreaction to the three great calamities of…
Sound and Fury: The Last Stand of Isolationism

This is an historiographic essay written for my graduate history program discussing US foreign policy in the pre-war period. I think this is one of the most important chapters of US history. The change in global strategy occurred as the US reacted to Germany’s victory over France and revisionist Japan asserted a claim as hegemon of Asia. The term…
Trumpageddon

President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. To most, that sentence states a fact. To many others, that sentence is just an ideological argument revealing someone’s epistemological preferences. And that’s the state of American civic life so far in 2021. The Art of the Steal Trump is a fascinating character. Before getting to denouncing him,…
American Discontent

I’ve always found it difficult to stay in the present. Chicago Fog comes from a love of history and a fascination with the ideas that shaped today’s world. At the same time I’ve always enjoyed futurism and the vision of science fiction writers, especially those who write near future realism. The context for science fiction,…
Flyover Bourgeois GenX Man

I’ve witnessed history being made four times in my half-century of life: the end of the Cold War, 9-11, the Financial Crisis of 2007-08, and now the Coronavirus pandemic. Those events—spaced roughly by 10 years—play outsized roles in public dialogue and analysis. They are omnipresent in people’s imaginations as they wrestle with current affairs. However,…
The Hazards of Political Belief Spectrums

The graphic above is from a discussion on a UK website called The Student Room. Chicago Fog believes this is a good representation of the parameters of political beliefs reflected in contemporary society: communism on one end and fascism on the other. Clearly, the maker of the spectrum must be from Canada, but this graphic…
Chicago Fog Archive, Blog 2.0

Syria, Anarchism’s Bad Brand, and Libya: Early experiments in essays for which Chicago Fog begs the reader’s forgiveness in advance of reading.