Communication between people defines us as social beings; all our senses are employed in the act of establishing contact and sharing information with others. Ordinarily, our senses work in concert with each other, creating a synesthetic blend of information from which we continuously convey and... Continue

In a society of over 300 million people efficiencies are needed, and representative democracy is how we choose to provide efficiency in the development and administration of governmental public policy. Other societies are organized differently but all governmental systems, whether democracy, monarchy or autocracy are... Continue

Benjamin Braddock, the part played by Dustin Hoffman in director Mike Nichol’s acclaimed film “The Graduate,” is taken aside by a dinner guest at the graduation party thrown for him by his parents and quietly told the secret to his future success. “Plastics,” the guest... Continue

Surveillance in the digital age is a universal reality at unprecedented scale, reaching into the intimate details of uncountable millions of individual lives. Now politely called “data-mining” to lessen it’s sense of violation, we used to call such activity espionage or spying and its “Peeping... Continue

It’s notable that so much of that which make us uniquely human remains hidden until we die. Metaphysical strands and threads invisibly connect us to each other, things and events in which we had a part, stretching through time and space often unacknowledged and unseen.... Continue

For most of human existence a nomadic way of life was life itself. Moving with the seasons alongside migrating animals while establishing temporary lodging lasted hundreds of thousands of years. The simple non-industrial hunter-gatherer style of life produced no garbage; everything used was natural and... Continue

I like getting the newspaper every day. I like the ritual of looking for it in the darkend driveway, and plopping it down on the kitchen table. I read the the “funnies” last, holding off what for me is the most revealing part of the... Continue

Human existence can be organized within two orders of experience. A first order experience is felt: unmediated sensory awareness responding moment to moment to the space around us. A second order experience includes image and thought, which arise due to the first order experience, and... Continue

I grew up with All-American images of clean-cut baseball heroes -- Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and the like. Despite later revelations of alcohol problems, their images as wholesome, talented sportsmen resonated across the 1950s and contributed to the backdrop of conformist cultural forms against which a... Continue