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
Public Citizen
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
Communication between people is a mix of words, gestures, facial expressions and tonality; in many circumstances, how we communicate is what we communicate; it's a matter of nuance. Words delivered with a sneer are received differently than those delivered with a smile. By observing the... Continue
Among the many effects of the Corona virus pandemic, one of the most remarkable is the widespread use of facial masks. Initially such masks were medical in style, the antiseptic-type nurses and health workers wear in hospitals; but before long a cottage industry of mask-making... Continue
When I was just a wee lad seven decades ago, Sundays were different than any other day of the week. For many Americans, Sundays were a day for Church or Temple; we were not a religious family, however, and Sunday services played no major part... Continue
We live in two worlds, the world of the large and the world of the small. The large world includes those things we can see with the naked eye, and the small world includes those things we can see only by using instruments, like electron... Continue
What's to be done when those we love and care about become the potential agents of our own demise? This pandemic presents us with an entirely foreign situation in America, where we have been largely spared the horror and pathos of war and the intimate... Continue
Super Tuesday appears to have provided the likely answer to the question of who will be the Democratic Party’s candidate for President this November, and it ain’t Bernie Sanders. Despite his win in California, the combined votes for Biden and Bloomberg in this state outweighs... Continue
Life on planet earth is a complex, adaptive system programmed for growth. Thus despite periodic major extinctions over its long history, earth continues to be populated by millions of species of plants and animals which have variously adapted to a wide range of habitats and... Continue