The Alleged Editor

Protect Us From King Sununu

To the Editor: New Hampshire’s founding fathers knew what it was like to live under a king. Our State Constitution imposes many limits on elected officials to prevent anyone from acting like a king. Elected officials are elected for two-year terms. Uniquely, we have an elected Executive Council. Appointments by the Governor must be approved by the Executive Council, as are contracts over $10,000. Unfortunately, New Hampshire now has a Governor who wants to play king. He says we are in an emergency and he should be given sole power to distribute $1.25 billion in Federal aid. He says there is no time for oversight …

Read more

Back to Normal? Not Without More Testing

To the Editor: All of us here in New Hampshire and the rest of the country are doing our best to push down the Covid-19 threat so that we can get back to our previous normal lives. However, it is important for our political leaders, the healthcare community and the business community to develop a strategy now to get there after the health threat subsides. Most professional medical experts and worldwide business leaders are already recognizing that a major component in any such strategy must be intensive and comprehensive Covid-19 testing and testing for Covid-19 antibodies. We can assume that if a person has developed …

Read more

Can’t Give It Away

On Monday, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil had less value on the market than a printed copy of this newspaper—which, under normal circumstances, is free. Anyone willing to accept delivery could expect to receive $40 along with each 42-gallon barrel. Demand for oil was already falling early in March, due to the coronavirus. Because Vladimir Putin was resisting his plan to keep oil prices comfortable by lowering production, Saudi Arabia’s fun-loving Prince Mohammad Bin Salman decided to start an oil price war against Russia. He jacked up production and offered big price breaks on Saudi crude. The combined effect was a glut …

Read more

“Darwin’s On Deck…”

In times as terrible as these—the news cycle dominated by daily infomercials featuring a clearly addled mountebank praising his own homicidally ham-fisted response to a lethal pandemic; the global economy wheezing like a chain-smoker in the Tour de France; choruses of ignored scientists chanting a litany of pending but unaddressed environmental catastrophes; and, apparently, no baseball—we must keep our heads, and strive to accomplish whatever good we can. As one small step toward that end, we propose the abolition of the term “intelligent design.” Intelligent design, as we all know, is a weasel-phrase engineered to insinuate religion into our public schools under an assumed name. …

Read more

The New, Improved Five O’Clock Follies

Noted epidemiologist, Vietnam War draft dodger, and President, Donald J. Trump now conducts televised daily briefings on the Federal Government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic—and whatever other random thought-substitutes may then be fluttering around, bat-like, in his belfry. We hope that scientists in the future—if there is one, and there are any—will study this phenomenon and confirm or deny the following theory, which is ours: when he gets in front of the cameras and talks, the nation’s collective IQ plummets. Collective intelligence is not exactly a commodity which we have in surplus. He should be grateful to the President’s handlers, though, for inducing him to …

Read more

The Big X-Ray

Last weekend Covid-19 was killing a thousand Americans a day. If the death rate doubles every six days or so, this weekend we’ll say goodbye to 4,000 more. This is, of course, quite terrible. It certainly seems so right now. All things being relative, though, and the laws of mathematics being as they are [the exponential function has a power that Bill Barr can only envy] a month or two from now we may look back and see these as the good old days. Remember the bumper sticker, “Giant Meteor 2016—Just End It Already”? The comet never came, but we got the next-worst thing: umpteen …

Read more