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Public Citizen

Cloud Nine

How funny it is that everybody's talking 'bout The Cloud! English lexicon has caught up with the reality of human consciousness: we have always had our heads in the clouds. Human beings float in a boundless sky of mental and emotional ambiguity from which we... Continue

Levels of abstraction

While I was having lunch with "the guys" I began talking about "how we know what we know." One friend interjected that what I was saying was "too abstract" to be of interest. This has happened to me before, and in such social situations switching topics... Continue

The peril of hatefulness

The rise of Donald Trump has many people shaking their heads in disbelief. How, they wonder, can a man who is so brutish and nasty rise to the Presidential candidacy of the Republican Party? The form of this query betrays a fundamental error: Trump is... Continue

The equanimity of annoyance

I get Donald Trump. I don't like him, but I get him. I understand why he acts and sounds like a jerk; The Donald is annoyed. Being annoyed places him the company of a lot of New Yorkers and former New Yorkers, like me. When... Continue

Must history repeat itself?

I'm old enough to have been right in the middle of the cultural, political and social turmoil of the nineteen sixties, and amidst the world's current upheavals I sometimes feel as if history is repeating itself. It's not difficult to make comparisons about then and... Continue

Eating Sunlight

I think that if we are going to alter human genetics, we should get going on it right away and concentrate on giving human beings the gift of photosynthesis. As  you most likely know, through photosynthesis plants feed themselves with sunlight. Chlorophyll, water, carbon dioxide... Continue

RoundUp, Slavery and Avarice

Much is being made of current research indicating that the Glyphosate in Monsanto's herbicide RoundUp is a likely carcinogen. A laboratory-made, liquid life-killing poison that turns dandelions to brown, withered husks in a day; that it probably causes cancer should surprise no one. Weeds in... Continue

Credit, debt and revolution

For most of the past 5,000 years, the period of human history when monetary systems arose and spread across the globe, wealth has been measured by the accumulation of assets. Land, precious metal, slaves, tulip bulbs or any combinations thereof - all of which at... Continue

Feeling Angry – Being Kind

We live in complex, trying times. We know more about what's happening in the world than any people who have ever lived before; much of it is disturbing, and about which we can often do little or mostly nothing. Closer to home, the emotions being... Continue

A trail of crumbs

I love to read books; pencil in hand I underline points and passages that strike me as important, add margin notes, and often return to read significant portions over again. I do some reading online, but for me it's no substitute for resting a book... Continue