The Trump rally of Sunday at Madison Square Garden has been in the news. The rally was billed as an occasion for the closing arguments of the Trump campaign. The “argument” developed as a hate fest, a racist orgy castigating Puerto Rico and immigrant citizens from Puerto Rico who certainly vote in elections. Trump himself,…
We watched a 2023 film entitled Poor Things. This is a fantasy, steampunk Frankenstein takeoff, that picks apart default moral assumptions of cultured society. Bella Baxter is brought back to life. Bella, waking with the brain of a newborn, learns to physically function as an adult female. The twist of this tale is Bella’s…
A widespread feature of Christianity is hardly ever spoken of. Entire cultural groups are yet to recover from this malignant, distorted, misshapen evaluation of human sexuality. Perhaps you’ve the wrestled with a haunting of shame, the guilt-goblin that obstructs, persists, impeding a natural expression of your mammalian self? Hauntings are concealed, never spoken of…
How many conversations have I overheard on the “golden rule”? You know the maxim which recommends that I demonstrate toward my fellowman/woman the same deference which I am wont to demonstrate toward myself. The consensus: everyone approves the rule of harmony, this prescription for universal peace-love-and-understanding. Simply keep the Golden Rule in mind, and…
Could Halloween as a matter of fact be a religious festival? I mean that taking stock of the otherworldly, that sense of life when touched by ghostly, supernatural presence, – a frank admission of fright, of something inscrutable about what life and death means… Nietzsche writes a speculative account of someone who experiences a…
I perused the New York Times email of today’s headlines. We are two weeks out from election day. Have you ever found yourself watching a prize fight that lasted too many rounds? At the final bell, judges render their decision and in the case of Trump v. Harris the judges will be the American…
I have nothing specific in mind, this morning. This text merits bringing to the fore for consideration. Scratch the surface of the widespread dissatisfaction with American society, and you will find those who wish to turn the country over to a sociopath are convinced that doom is in store. Divine judgment is near. There’s…
References to the macabre are hyperbole it seems to me, in relation to our Halloween. American kids look forward to scoring a bagful of free candy treats while thinly disguised in the costume of choice. Halloween is by no means as comparably serious as the Dia de Muertos in Mexico that features offerings to…
We viewed a film noir, The Killing by Stanley Kubrick. One’s sense of viewing, the take-away from the film hinges as much upon what one brings to the screen, as upon Kubrick’s cinematic composition of the tale of a horse racetrack heist. The mastermind of the theft from the track counting room, Johnny Clay is…
A world without suffering is easy to imagine. Every human that has lived, members of our species, we language enabled mammals, finding ourselves thrown into this world, experience pain on many accounts. To avoid pain, to seek pleasure is and has been universal. A world without suffering has been a theme of countless legends,…
