I recently exchanged emails with a friend on the topic of gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the practice of shaping the voting districts to align with the population density that has supported the party in power, according to past election data. The majority party, the one in power gets to manipulate the boundaries of electoral districts,…
I’ve always loved this song. It is one of Elvis signature tunes, but the credit for the superlative lyric go to Ronnie Milsap and Eddie Rabbitt. The lyric knits together time and place by means of a consuming quest for a person who is loved. Each of us is a mystery to ourselves, our…
Sutherland Springs, Texas, First Baptist Church, Devin Patrick Kelley, 15 magazines of AR-15 ammo, 15 rounds per mag, emptied into the congregation. Twenty six people are killed. Kelley is dead. I read these “facts” and more on the CNN website. The bottomless analysis of the event continues. Everyone who has an opinion weighs in,…
“We acknowledge the receipt of your order for five triple furnaces including two electric elevators for raising the corpses and one emergency elevator..” –excerpt of letter from I A Topf and Sons, manufacturers of heating equipment to the commandant of Auschwitz concerning the new “heating system.” “…for putting the bodies into the furnace we…
Propaganda is an ostensible appeal to reason and to action which is in fact essentially irrational. We are all the more susceptible to its irrational appeal since we are subject to the same systematic irrationality in advertising. There is such a thing as a labyrinth of information; the information is truly abundant and complex,…
Our last evening in Sister Bay we picked a restaurant called Chop. The place appeared to be newer by comparison to the other places we had dined during our stay. So close to Lake Michigan, but I had enough fish, so anticipated consuming something different for our last evening meal in Door County. The…
Heard this song on the radio yesterday. The lyrics keep coming back to me. I believe that it is much more than a simple love song. How difficult it is to make a pact with oneself to respect, to honor the integrity of one’s own one life. How difficult it is to accept ourselves,…
“Help me to forget today’s pain…….” Tuesday mid-afternoon and the empire staggers on. Too melodramatic? I hope so. I heard snippets of a report from the fires in Northern California. Santa Rosa is incinerated in the wind lashed wild fire. Wine country burns. At the very same time our head of the EPA is…
I was in North Carolina when the news broke on the music festival shooting in Las Vegas. I happened to check my phone news-feed late in the evening, and there it was. The text displayed a estimated number of casualties at the time. I clicked on the video/audio clip associated with the story. Immediately…
At our last philosophy discussion session I was asked a question that I did not immediately answer. The question posed was did I not think that tribalism would always be with us? We’ve discussed tribalism within our group often, and for many months, years even. The term stands for the defensive posture, the ethnocentrism,…
