It’s hard to believe it has been almost 50 years since the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders of 1969. Unfortunately we are reminded of these murders on too regular of a basis. They were again in the news recently when Gov. Jerry Brown overruled the parole board’s recommendation to release Leslie Van Houten, one of many Manson […]
Matt Talbot: A look back at Archie Bunker and ‘The Greatest Generation’
In the early 1970s, the most popular show on television was “All in the Family,” a sitcom produced by legendary writer and producer Norman Lear. The show traced the ups and downs of the Bunker family, and was a groundbreaking show for its day. While sitcoms in the 1960s – shows like “Gilligan’s Island,” “Bewitched” […]
Matt Talbot: Some thoughts on the American auto industry
American luxury sedans dating from before the 1974 oil crisis. That column was, in part, an elegy for a vanished Golden Age of American manufacturing. In that column, I wrote: “It is hard to convey, at this remove, how completely American car companies used to dominate the American market. As recently as the mid-70s General […]
Devon Minnema: The perversion of liberal and conservative ideologies
It seems that terms and ideologies have been completely scrambled, not just in this election cycle, but in the course of American history. For instance, the argument of “conservative” versus “liberal” today would utterly confuse the Founding Fathers, who actually felt that the roots of words imbued significance through cultural history not just the social […]
Matt Talbot: The United States of America is a beautiful country
Regular readers will know that I’ve offered my share of critiques of the United States in this space over the years. I offer them not because I hate America, but because I love her enough to believe she can be better, and I trust her enough to know that in the long run she will […]
Matt Talbot: Some thoughts on Universal Basic Income
I’ve come across the idea of a “Universal Basic Income” in the last few months, and the idea is interesting enough that I thought I’d devote some column space to it this week. The idea is fairly simple to explain: under most schemes, every adult citizen would receive an income sufficient to provide a basic, […]
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 […]
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 […]