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
Public Citizen
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
The ideal of a stable society has preoccupied humankind for a long time, perhaps forever. In order to promulgate social stability, diverse methods have been attempted by various systems of governance and leadership ranging from autocratic to democratic, communal to sovereign, hard-fisted to liberal. All... Continue
I'm currently sporting a hair style I call the Covid; in other periods it’s been called the Einstein, a wild style ill-suited to going out of the house. Over my 72 years, I've had all sorts of hair styles. In my childhood, a crew-cut was... Continue
The coronavirus has reportedly killed over 60,000 people in America as of April 30th - probably far more - a large number but still a small percentage of our total population. It's effects on life, on the other hand, have affected all 325 million of... Continue