And so we come to the talking dog’s (the reticent homo sapien behind the talkative canine) 55th birthday. Which means, for those who can’t do arithmetic, that I was born during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Somehow, we survived that. I’d like to think that the republic (and its occupants) will survive the current crisis we are in. OK; that’s pretty much all I have.

While the republic continues its ongoing journey to hell in a hand-basket in front of us because one of our “major” parties is willing to be in league with the Devil (or at least a hostile foreign power) in order to hold power, even if it means, well, the republic going to hell in a hand-basket, your talking dog managed to eke out a finish in his 50th marathon (the goal of 50-states is stuck now at 21 states plus 2 Canadian provinces and D.C., but we’re still working on it!) It was a lovely day, albeit still too hot,...

By now, you are doubtless well-versed in “the worst mass shooting in American history,” which took place in Orlando Las Vegas. Before I go all “meta-” on yo’ asses, I’m going to give you two well laid out thought pieces. The first is from Vox, and gives seventeen things you need to know about America’s uniquely high level of gun violence. For example, with four per cent of the world’s population, we have about half of the privately owned guns, states with the tightest gun control laws have the lowest levels of gun violence, most gun deaths are suicides, we...

The first post on this here blog popped up sixteen years ago, today. The original format of this blog was as a two-column “point-counterpoint” between moi, then “the left-leaning dog,” and the former blogger known then as “the rabid dog” and later known as “the raving atheist,” that lasted a couple of months or so, before the current one-column forum whereby “the talking dog” became the sole voice here. And so here we are. “Blogs” were then a new phenomenon, as the much younger internet (although then, as now, a little too dependent on gambling, porn and fraud) had not...

Run, don’t walk, to this piece in the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates called “The First White President.” For those wondering why so many were obsessed with “the White working class,” and what that had to do with an election where the circus clown (Coates prefers “carnival barker”) Donald J. Trump prevailed in every economic category of White people for no reason other than that he was White (to be fair, I would add that he was also male)… Coates gives us the rather unsettling answers. Coates’s thesis, which has the troubling attribute of evidence, is that the handing of the...

Next month will mark the sixteenth anniversary of this blog, not to mention the sixteenth anniversary of America’s Own Reichstag Fire[TM], September 11th (and now, as then, I still work a city block or so from the WTC complex). Still trying to reconcile the fact that the winning combination of the minority of American voters managed to install an actual circus clown as President, at a moment when the American Empire is coming apart at the seams anyway, largely as a result of the decisions made as a result of… the aftermath of September 11th. Specifically, the endless expenditure on...

Long-time GTMO prisoner and “child soldier” (apprehended and taken to GTMO when he was fifteen years old) Omar Khadr will receive ten million dollars in compensation for mistreatment he received in custody as well as an apology from… wait for it… Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government. You didn’t think that Donald Trump’s #AmericaFirstmeansRussiafirst government would have done anything like that, did you? Well, I didn’t. And it didn’t. Happy fourth of July. Given how much “great work he is doing” according to our current American President, I link you to Frederick Douglass’s Fourth of July address (Rochester, NY, 1852).

It’s Dominion Day in the Great White North (funny that expression in light of developments in the soon-to-be-former-superpower to its South)… and there were well-attended celebrations of Canada Day on its 150th anniversary. No context; just puttin’ it out there. Oh… isn’t he dreamy?

As is often the case, I must temper my remarks by noting my personal exhaustion: I had a “short finish” (31 miles out of the official length of 40) in yesterday’s BUS Anniversary Run in Queens (Alley Pond Park), followed by today’s NYRR Retro 5-Miler in Central Park to mark the NY Road Runners Club’s 59th anniversary. Seems a big weekend for running club anniversaries. And speaking of things that have been around a while, what can we say about the President’s ongoing feud with London Mayor Sadiq Khan, which resulted in the President pouring salt on the wounds of...

Everything I want to say on the subject has been said better by Professor Lemieux concerning what’s wrong with the chattering classes, to wit, God forbid political coverage tell us the actual substance of a policy, such as the abomination that just passed the House of Representatives that purports to repeal the suddenly-popular-package-of-health-insurance-programs-best-known-as-ACA-or-Obamacare. Bottom line to Chris Cillizza (formerly of WaPo, now trading his superficial wares at CNN) is that the Democrats sang the lines from a song by “Steam,” “Na na na na hey hey goodbye” (or whatever they did) upon passage of the bill in the House [btw,...