I awoke at 5:50AM a few minutes before the alarm would have aroused me from slumber. In the darkness my first thoughts were that Friday is a nice day, I have a fine vantage point to observe the demise of our democracy, our civil society. Two days in the aftermath of a failed coup,…
I awakened to the news that the Democrats appear to have won the Georgia runoffs. That means that control of the Senate passes from the Trump Party to the Democrats. The new Biden Administration stymied at every turn by a Republican controlled Senate would have been a nightmare four years in duration. For me…
I want to do things that I did when I was sixteen. I would spend hours walking in the woods, in any season. I carried a Mars Chocolate Bar in one pocket, my hunting knife on my belt, my 22 rifle in my hand, and a box of 50 shells in the other pocket. …
A light snowfall last night. Everything is coated with white, beautiful and temporary. Life for human beings is a mix of good and evil, light and darkness if you will. We cannot speak directly about “good” or it’s opposite, evil. We use metaphor to describe what we mean. Plato’s allegory of the cave is…
This the final day of the year 2020. What does the future hold for us? And there is only us. The worst delusion is to imagine that my fate is not entwined with that of others. Each of us is individual, a paradox of sentiment and thought, one-of-a-kind in all of the world, indeed,…
Three more days remain in 2020. The year has been one of pandemic, and of the nation roiled by the incompetence of the Trump administration. I am offended by incompetence. A state of incompetence, the inability to carefully execute a task to completion is something expected of children. When adults are incompetent, especially when…
1. Across the United States, thousands of businesses have closed during the pandemic, but the demise of so many beloved hangouts cuts especially deep. They were local landmarks — watering holes, shops and haunts that weathered recessions and world wars, only to succumb to the economic ravages of the coronavirus. 2.The myth of a…
I am not sure when I learned to work. Learning how to work, is open ended, a quest that one pursues over the arc of years until one no longer has any curiosity, or the will to expend further energy. Work is the expenditure of energy in a focused fashion to achieve a more…
It is Christmas eve. Conditions have turned bone chilling cold outside. It is 12 degrees Fahrenheit according to the iphone weather app. Those are unforgiving conditions, like the honed edge of a tempered steel blade. I read this report in today’s New York Times, written by David Leonhardt: Yet it is also clear that…
In the course of the philosophy discussion of this week, the alternative viewpoints, of freedom or of determinism came up. This durable topic surfaces often with us. How free are we? Are we as free as we feel, as free as we were taught as Americans, a culture with a heritage of Enlightenment…
