Weaponizing anger is a dangerous game.  Bernie Sanders tried it in the last Presidential election and so did Donald Trump.  Trump did it better and he remains a beacon for those who feel disenfranchised.  What both candidates did was tap into the residue loathing still with us from

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 65 million years.  They may have managed it because they had  small brains.  They didn’t possess enough grey matter to imagine how to tinker with their environment.  Homo sapiens used theirs  to disrupt the planet.  So many changes are  far f

Somewhere along my 8 years of blogging, I picked up a gaggle of folks from East Africa..  I’ve learned they are deeply religious, possibly members of the same church.  Most of the time, I read their  patter about what God wants from us and what we must do to be good Christians. 

My father taught me the difference between truth and a lie when I was five.  The story begins with a teddy bear, a tiny, plastic ornament that hung at the end of my toothbrush. I loved to watch it in the bathroom mirror, bouncing up and down as I cleaned my teeth.  One day, the tedd

My Yahoo news page came up with the following headline, recently: “Bernie Sanders followers are among the smartest…  They don’t believe anything.  The post must have proof…”   I didn’t read further. I’m not a Bernie Sanders fan, though some of my Facebook friends hav

James Wolcott in a recent essay pokes his finger at the thorn of my discontent.  We are in a period of hysteria where the political alt-right and alt-left, overblown with fears and secretly hoping for a revolution, begin to sound the same.  As Wolcott explains, the two sides may not

The Overton Window is the current term for moving the inert political middle to the right or the left.  It refers to “the range of policies on any given issue that are, at the moment, popular enough for a politician to campaign on successfully.” (“A Theory of Everything,” by

Two days before the inauguration of Donald Trump as 45th President of the United State, a woman on Facebook had a freak-out.  Did she blame the Tea Party for his election, the Republicans, the rust belt, the Evangelicals?  No, she blamed Hillary Clinton because she shot down Bernie�

The morning after the 2016 Presidential election, I shared a link on Facebook but failed to vet it.  Loss of sleep and disappointment over the outcome led me to be careless.  But that’s no  excuse and I apologized to my friends on the social media site. Due diligence is the watch

After the flap over Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s unflattering remarks about Donald Trump, I thought we had laid to rest the illusion that people, including justices, are impartial.  Certainly, Sandra Day O’Conner wasn’t impartial in 2000 when she decried that Al