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10 May

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

Let's explore the real origins of Mother's Day, observed yesterday. Not at all what you have been led to believe. Mother's Day began in the United States in the early 20th century. It's only indirectly related to the many traditional celebrations of fertility, maternity, and...

26 Apr

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Expectable clichés are mouthed in this country every time another atrocity is committed. Thoughts and prayers. Sympathies and condolences. Processing, trauma, healing, closure.

19 Apr

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely....

12 Apr

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Let me note at the outset that if any readers are devoutly religious, please understand that no individual offense is felt or intended by my following remarks. I respect your spirituality, if not always your belief system. But I do feel strongly that the United States was founded as a secular country and must remain so.

23 Mar

Posted at 10:27h in Uncategorized

In looking back through the posts of this blog, I realize that I first mentioned the Coronavirus on January 26 of 2020, and by March 1 these posts were running hard on the subject--and we were also surmising that no one would be done with...

15 Mar

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

Laid low last week by an acute case of food poisoning, I swam in and out of cognitive ratiocination in a fog of rolling nausea. But I had some insights on race, precipitated probably by news of the reliably unchangeable British family–which of late is...

01 Mar

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

I once inveighed against the American system of government, longing instead for the parliamentary system that permitted the bringing down of an administration whenever enough support for that could be mustered. Oh, think of that! The United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate...

22 Feb

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

The FBI has finally proclaimed white supremacist groups as our greatest domestic security threat, and the Department of Homeland Security has followed suit. They haven't got around to adding "male supremacy" yet--after all, this part took them more than 30 years. I write "more than 30...

08 Feb

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
The greatest deliberative body in the world. That's how the United States Senate has been described, a group portrait that's an exercise in aspirational hyperbole, to my mind.