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Blog Calendar – March 17 2024 CE: Rio de Janeiro posts record heat index of 62.3 C (144.1 F) – i.e. taking into account humidity, highest in Brazil in a decade (actual temperature 42 C) *2024 CE: After suppressing and murdering opponents, President Vladimir Putin claims a post-Soviet record election victory, with 87.8% of the vote. The six year term will make him Russia’s longest-serving leader in over 200 years. *2024 CE: “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV” documentary detailing the toxic nature of some Nickelodeon shows, especially under Dan Schneider during the 1990s, early 2000s, premieres…

For anyone who’s been living in a cave since November 4, 2024, Dump* won the election and has become “president” for a second term. I put the word president in quotes because not only is he NOT presidential, but he actually took the oath of office without having had his hand on either of the two Bibles Melania was holding (we know because one or both might have burst into flames), which is basically the official equivalent of making a promise to a peer on the playground while having one hand behind one’s back negating that very promise. While I…

I had always, until 2015, been under the impression that the longer we live, the smarter we get. By “we,” I mean the human race, as a whole. Over the millennia, there have been individuals whose curiosity led them to make various discoveries in science and philosophy and mathematics and law and psychology and physics and engineering, and every bit of knowledge that we gained meant that we took a step forward. Because of a lack of good communication in the past, say prior to the 19th century, many discoveries were made contemporaneously in various parts of the planet, but…

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…