Turning Medical Science Back to 1900

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August 31, 2025 — US president William McKinley died in 1901 of gunshot wounds that modern medicine could easily have handled. Without x-rays, his doctors couldn’t find the second bullet, and without antibiotics, they couldn’t fight the sepsis that killed him.

When Donald Trump wants to Make America Great Again [MAGA], his idea of when America was great is evidently the McKinley Administration of 1897-1901.  Why? Trump in February 2025: “He was a strong believer in tariffs, and we were actually probably wealthiest of any time, relatively speaking, at any point in the history of our country.”  The McKinley Tariff dated from 1890, when he was a Senator.  During his presidency, he himself turned against tariffs.) read more

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Trump’s Taylor Rule

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Co-authored with Sohaib Nasim

July 31, 2025 — Donald Trump has now gone beyond his usual norm-busting habits in his criticism of Federal Reserve Board Chair Jay Powell.  He has harassed him to cut interest rates by 300 basis points, has heaped abuse upon Powell personally, has trumped up accusations regarding the remodeling of the Fed’s building, and has gone so far as to draft a letter to fire him.   (That is, to remove him from the chairmanship.  Even Trump must realize that he doesn’t have the legal power to remove Powell from the Federal Reserve Board altogether.) read more

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Did you believe Trump would not enter wars in Mideast?

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June 26, 2025 — Many people believed candidate Trump when he swore to avoid military entanglement.   In my January blog post,  at inauguration time, I wrote these two sentences, as a supposed lookback from the end of Trump’s 1st year:

“Pundits were soon chastising each other for having taken Trump’s isolationist foreign policy to imply a renunciation of military intervention abroad.  They suddenly remembered George W. Bush’s reversal, early in his presidency, of the very high bar that candidate Bush had set for military interventions, when rejecting nation-building in October 2000.” read more

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