Category: Liege & Lief

  • Covid-19 #3: 2023, Omicron

    Continuity This Post This post has been updated or republished periodically since January 3, 2023. It was concluded May 6, 2023, when the World Health Organization declared the end of its formal determination that Covid-19 had become a world-wide emergency (Pandemic). It follows earlier posts: Omicron evolved Omicron, Pango lineage B.1.1.529, was discovered in South…

  • American Republics

    American Republics by Alan Taylor is an accessible book for a broad audience by a professional historian. It addresses the period after the Revolution when the U.S.A. expanded to occupy the midwest, the Great Plains, the Southwest and the Pacific Northwest. The book discusses the issues on which many Americans shared the same attitudes. Americans…

  • Covid-19 #2: 2022, Omicron

    Continuity This Post This post was written over a few months from late August 2022 to December 2022, was first published in October, and revised. It follows an earlier post, Covid-19 #1: Covid-19 wanes, Omicron Rises. Omicron evolved Omicron, Pango lineage B.1.1.529, was recognized as a variant of concern of Covid-19 by the WHO in…

  • Covid-19 #1: Covid-19 wanes, Omicron rises

    This Post This post was written in the spring and summer of 2022. I stopped working on it, subject to corrections, August 19, 2022. Covid-19 The Pandemic The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic is a mass infectious disease, caused by repeated mass infections with SARS-CoV-2 viruses. The name means: The original SARS-CoV-2 virus was: An outbreak of…

  • Populism vs. Elites – who is elite

    The United States of America was founded as a republic. It does not recognize that members of a hereditary aristocracy have formal legal power to make laws or command other persons, or any personal legal rights and privileges. America has social classes, based on wealth and income. Sociologists recognize 6 classes: Some sociologists and political…

  • Wulfrunian

    A Wulfrunian 1A Wulfrunian is not a member of an alien people in a video game. Draconian was the name of a video game in the 1980s. It was also a trope refers to the disproportionate severity of punishments in the first written legal code of Athens. Some lawyers, tired of the hyperbole of comparing…

  • Energy Transitions

    Energy Transitions by Vaclav Smil, published in 2010, is short. Reading it took time. The book is a narrative survey of some studies of changes in the way humans have used energy to perform work. Humans and animals convert biological mass (food) and heat and light from the sun into chemicals that grow into muscles…

  • Deer Hunting with Jesus

    Joe Bageant was a journalist who wrote about how America misunderstood its white working class. He said in an inteview with the BBC in 2008 that white working class “rednecks” have political power, and were tending to conservative populism. Bageant’s comment on the financial crisis of 2008, Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball almost predicted the…

  • American Nations

    Some writers – e.g. in a post in the Marginal Revolutions blog in 2017, the economist Tyler Cowen – mention American nations : a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America as a partial explanation for support for the candidacy of Donald Trump among American working class and middle class voters in…

  • Citizenship

    From AL Daily, top of the page on June 26/07, the Commencement Address by Dana Gioia to the graduates of Stanford University on June 17, 2007. Worthwhile and quotable. Speaking of the media and culture in the 1950’s: I don’t think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed…