My Blogs

The honor system is something many of us have heard about all our lives. It’s a system by which we survive by following unspoken but well-known rules, like not cheating on tests, not pilfering from the cash drawer at work, not stepping out on our significant other while we are on business trips. These are things that we’ve heard about, but that, at a certain point in our lives, no one should have to tell us directly. They are – at least in certain societies – rules that we’ve grown up with and grown into and pretty much abide by…

The Dump* Enigma Now that Dump has his four indictments on 91 counts, and four upcoming criminal trials in four courts with four judges, we still have a problem. From all the living former presidents – Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama – we hear barely a peep, but Dump is in the news in a big way on a daily basis. Why is that? Dump is unique as having left the presidency in an age of the overuse of X (formerly Twitter), and became accustomed to using it in a way that no previous president had. All the…

For those of you who don’t remember, there was a game show that ran in the US from 1940-1988, first on radio and then on television, in which contestants who failed to answer certain questions truthfully were forced to face the consequences of their wrong answers. Back in the day, people took this seriously as an object lesson in truth versus lies and fact versus fiction. Somehow, during the intervening years, we seem to have forgotten many of the lessons we learned from the Torah/Bible (“Thou shalt not bear false witness”), from historical figures like George Washington (admitting to having…

Fans of Seinfeld will remember one of the earlier episodes in which George decides to “slip [his boss] a mickey.” On the show, George is frustrated by the way his entitled boss acts, and thinks it would be amusing to do this as it sounds like “something people do in the movies,” and he even manages to enlist Elaine in the project. Fortunately, even though he makes the attempt, it does not work as intended, and all is forgotten. In real life, this is conspiracy and attempted murder, both of which are felonies, and he and Elaine would have spent…

As I write this the morning after the first insurrection in my recorded history, I think back to the July, 2016 afternoon when D(onald J. Tr)ump (hereinafter “Dump”) spoke from a Florida golf course on live television and invited Russia, in so many words, to hack into US e-mail servers to look for Hillary Clinton’s “missing e-mails.” That was the day that I actively started keeping track of his activities and telling people that he should be arrested and charged with treason, and should by no means be permitted to run for office. I was also – and still am…

As you might have noticed from my previous posts, I tend toward the logical and pragmatic, and I will use that approach here, as well. So, let us begin with the premise that health care is neither a right nor a privilege, but a necessity. We have all been sick at one time or another. We have had a disease or an injury or a condition, and we knew that we should see a doctor to have it diagnosed and treated. Some of us, however, could not go to a doctor because we could not afford it for one reason…

A few years back, when social media was taking its first tentative steps into the digital world, I asked around about it. Naturally, no one is born into this world automatically knowing about social media. What I got as an explanation – basically, that it duplicated everything I was getting via e-mail, only this would open up my life to the scrutiny of the whole world rather than my intended victims – put me off. I send essays, comments, personal letters, photographs, to a limited number of people who may be interested. The rest of the world has their own…

Before we begin, I want to make it clear that I am the product of a fairly comprehensive education at the hands of the New York State public schools, and despite the fact that Latin was removed from our high school curriculum the year before I entered, and, incredibly, despite the fact that I am guilty of never having done a day’s worth of homework in my entire pre-college career, I am an educated person and I remember things that I learned sitting in the classroom. I even remember getting a 95% on an English exam about The Old Man…

As I’m sure you have all heard, Fentanyl is a growing problem in this country. Many of the recent opioid deaths are a direct result of Fentanyl – either from its direct use, or from other drugs being cut with it. And, as it turns out, 99.9% of Fentanyl comes to us directly from China (the PRC). It is produced there – along with a plethora of designer narcotics – and sold illegally on line. The US government has been looking into this illegal trade (see 60 Minutes broadcast of 28 April 2019), and has been taking steps to shut…

We, The People is the opening line of the Constitution of the United States, drafted in 1787, and still holding us together 232 years later. Pretty amazing for an upstart country to form itself into a union under the circumstances that we did – fighting off the British and the French and oppressing the natives – and that we have managed to keep it alive so long without descending into anarchy or dictatorship is equally amazing. Yet here we are in 2019 having a Constitutional crisis. Why? Because, for starters, of lack of education. If every American citizen who gets…