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Lots of work, little time to waste

Luck, the saying goes, is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. That’s good luck. What about bad luck? It’s the opposite. Bad luck is what happens when lack of preparation meets an ongoing threat. We’re watching this play out now as fires tragically turn large swaths of Los Angeles’ most valuable real estate to ashes, with a massive price paid, including human lives. We’re just starting to read about dry fire hydrants caused by water shortages resulting from dumping water into the ocean to protect smelt fish. Operations budget cuts at the Los Angeles Fire ...

The masses win, the experts lose

The times, they are a-changing. The balance of power in the perhaps eternal battle between the experts and the masses has been shifting starkly, even wildly, with the former losing and the latter gaining clout. That’s been most visible in the series of announcements and selfies emanating from the gaudy precincts of Mar-a-Lago. The experts like to scoff at what they consider a poor man’s idea of how a rich man lives. Those more attuned to the masses can respond that the compound was built with money made from sales of breakfast cereal. The most striking shift came this week on ...

Who will get credit for successes?

Trump will try to take credit for the Biden economy. Don’t let him. And don’t let Republican enablers of Trump or the media give him credit, either. In 2017, Trump inherited a strong economy from President Obama and never stopped congratulating himself for it. He claimed that “we created the greatest economy in the history of the world.” Rubbish. Trump tanked the economy with his trade wars and his botched pandemic response. Now, Trump is inheriting an even stronger economy. On Friday, the Department of Labor reported that the nation added 256,000 jobs in December, ...

Reality Hollywood can’t change

We recall the catastrophic fires in Maui almost two years ago, then the horde of unusually violent hurricanes trashing Florida’s west coast. To the surprise of many, those storms unleashed cataclysmic flooding in western North Carolina, up there in the mountains. All these extreme weather events were tied in part to warming temperatures. As for wiping out large parts of an entire civilization, though, nothing can match the wildfires torching community after community in and around Los Angeles. But in the case of Los Angeles, the problem isn’t just climate change. It’s the climate ...

Dumbing down New Jersey schools

Among the many laws that took effect at the beginning of this new year is one in New Jersey that will astound and should anger people with children in the state’s public schools. It’s called Act 1669 and it removes a requirement that teachers pass a basic reading, writing and math test to be eligible to teach. The law was signed by Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) last June. The rationale, if one can call it rational, is that New Jersey is not attracting enough teachers to the profession and so standards must be lowered so more will apply. This reminds me of what the Army has done for ...

Democrats aren’t democracy’s party

When Donald Trump is sworn in next week, America will have a president for the first time in four years. The Biden era hasn’t been a presidency but an interregnum, with seemingly no one in charge in Washington. The sign on Harry Truman’s desk used to say, “The buck stops here.” Where did it stop with Joe Biden in the Oval Office? Voters never asked for an experiment in leaderless administration, but the party that put Biden in power gave them one anyway. In the 21st century, Democrats are misnamed: They’re the less democratic of the two great parties, and their ...