I happened upon an interview the other day between Chuck Todd and Chad Wolf on NBC's Meet the Press. Wolf is the Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, although even that job designation is in question now that an ethics committee has found... Continue
Public Citizen
The story goes that very long ago, a hermit lived in sacred mountains, a Buddhist monk named Shih. Now, even hermits do not live entirely alone; they depend upon the generosity and support of a small community of others, and so it was that when... Continue
The way TV commercials tell it, being chronically ill is nothin' but fun! Diabetes, COPD, Heart Failure, Atrial Fib, Plaque Psoriasis, Eczema, HIV...with the right pharmaceuticals every illness can be, well, wonderful. Interestingly, all the people in these ads appear to be pretty well off,... Continue
We've recently celebrated another July 4th, America's independence from Great Britain. To be honest, I've never been much of a fan of nationalism. It's not that I don't appreciate the various freedoms and opportunity that living here provides; I'm well aware that life in many... Continue
The doorbell rings and outside the door is a well-dressed young white man. How do you feel? Or, outside the door is a well-dressed young black man. Do you feel differently? Or, in either case, the young men are poorly dressed. How does that affect... Continue
In describing the bureaucratic workings of Fascism, political theorist Hannah Arendt famously referred to "the banality of evil." She was making reference to the workaday style of Adolph Hitler's genocide machine, an apparatus of many ordinary parts employing ordinary people to carry out extraordinary horror.... Continue
I'm a Jewish white boy who was raised in an upper middle class suburb outside of New York City where almost no black people lived. I say almost, because there was one black student by the name of Sam Houston in my class in grammar... Continue
Our conceptions of joy, love, companionship, creativity, aesthetics and the like are the stuff of human culture, highly meaningful to people but of no particular consequence to nature. If we ruthlessly consider the fundamental role of animal life on earth, we quickly arrive at one... Continue
In the midst of this pandemic I've been reviewing household expenses, including the various types of insurance we carry. Much of it is standard stuff such as homeowner insurance for fire, theft and liability, and auto coverage for our one car; also, some additional umbrella... Continue
Nature on this planet functions as a complex adaptive system, a self-regulating, self-propagating process responsive to changing conditions. It is a totalistic meta-system with no "off" switch and within which all the individual systems of each biological entity are enmeshed and interdependent. Accordingly, entirely isolating... Continue