(Note: This was originally published in the March 29, 2012 edition) Writing in the Wall Street Journal on March 16, the well-known political scientist Charles Murray points out that there has been a fundamental cultural change in recent years and, as he argues in his latest book Coming Apart, it threatens to shred the basic […]
Bruce Robinson: Teach to the task, not to the test
(Note: This was originally published in the March 6, 2012 edition of the Herald) Here’s the latest news on the education front: Twenty-six more states have asked to be exempt from the No Child Left Behind Act. That’s on top of the 11 states Obama gave a special dispensation to last month. If the president […]
Bruce Robinson: Where’s our common cents?
(Note: This article was originally published in the December 18, 2011 edition of the Herald) How do people get rich? In America, most people get rich at first by working hard and saving whatever they can. Eventually, they save enough to invest in stocks. If the economy is good, the value of their stock increases […]
Bruce Robinson: Vetting the vets
(Note: This article was originally published in the December 7, 2011 edition of the Herald) “There’s no better defense than an aggressive defense.” “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” These immortal utterances by a 20th Century football coach and an 18th Century lexicographer may seem like strange sources of political wisdom, but there’s […]
Bruce Robinson: “A foolish consistency” or the “iron string”?
(Note: This was originally published in the May 1, 2016 edition of the Herald) It has been 174 years since the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson first published his 10,000-word essay titled “Self-Reliance.” [http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm] Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, school and college textbooks included at least a condensed version of this essay […]
Grant Cooke: Our Age of Discovery threatened by new demagogue
Coming from a cloistered Central Valley farm town to the Bay Area of the late 1960s was a transformational experience—a personal age of discovery. At UC Berkeley, I realized that it wasn’t just me, but in fact, the world stood at the beginnings of a remarkable new era of discovery. A few decades later, we […]
Matt Talbot: A bright, flashing warning
Mark Twain supposedly once said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes,” and I think he was onto something. The United States is not Weimar Germany, but there are some non-trivial similarities that ought not to be dismissed. While Americans are not post-Great War Germans half-starved by years of reparations payments, I suspect a […]
Devon Minnema: The void left by Bernie Sanders
Now that the primary here in California is over and we have a fairly concrete idea of who the two nominees will be, it’s time that we dispel some false ideas before we etch this primary into history. One that I have heard a few too many times is essentially that Bernie Sanders’ popularity among […]
What Benicia can learn from the Oregon train derailment
On Friday, June 3, a Union Pacific train carrying Bakken crude oil derailed in the town of Mosier, Ore. Fourteen rail cars came off the tracks, and four exploded over a 5 hour period. There are several things that the City Council needs to keep in mind whenever they re-open discussion of the appeal of […]
Facing reality, part 2
In last week’s column, I quoted an article in The Imaginative Conservative by my friend, the author John Medaille: “This is not an election about the head, but about the heart, and at the heart of American politics is a burning rage. Rage that our livelihoods have been sacrificed to abstract economic theories; rage that […]