Disclaimers Honoring what is left of the Fourth Amendment, I should say, at the outset there is nothing wrong with the right sort of privacy — good fences build good neighbors, don’t make love at the garden gate, keep your Stasi wiretaps out of my phone calls — all of that. No one should be..
Pure Misinformation The white-hot, laser-bright line between abject fear and totalitarianism was hugely on display, yesterday, in the Supreme Court’s hearing of a case calling into question the Biden administration’s OSHA vaccine mandate. I’m not a lawyer, nor even a student of the court, but I’ve read enough court transcripts to register, with high alarm,..
Dazed and Confused Since the outbreak of Covid in March of 2020 — twenty-two months now — I continue to make this sad confession: “I still have no idea what is going on.” I am not, of course, talking about the obvious contours of the crisis. A dangerous virus is getting people sick and killing..
A Cloud of Sadness One of the most “centered” people I know — a winsome young lady whose good cheer promised better times when our entire extended family was feuding — confessed to being bewildered by a cloud of sadness descending on the world. She’s not alone. The Weinsteins, on their DarkHorse Podcast, recently wondered which author..
The older I get, and the more I learn, the more I’m willing to look back at intervals of my life characterized by bad assumptions, faulty conclusions and passionate attachment to falsehood. It took me years, for example, to really understand religious legalism, to understand how you could slip into it without knowing it, and..
When Uber first arrived on the scene, it confirmed my Emerald City, Post-Millennial sense of things: “It’s Getting Better All The Time.” (Of course, that’s in a trend-line sort of way, as anyone who has lost weight knows. History is a roller coaster with hills and valleys.) As far as Uber is concerned, I was..
Woke up from this dream.. As twilight descends on an azure mid-western city, (I believe it might be Columbus, Ohio), a grand blue light billows across the streetscape, causing the crowds to pause and wonder with a low collective groan of approval. It’s a cathedral-sized observatory, several stories high, and the blue light is radiating..
The Regularizing Influence: I was a nerdy grind in my late 1970s public high school, but the television was on quite a bit at home, with the usual cycle: afternoon re-runs of the Rifleman and Ozzie & Harriet, followed by evening news, a break for family dinner, a few mom-approved sitcoms and then, sometimes, nightly..
St. Louis, MO • ICBTS News In the wake of horribly anti-black racist graffiti that inspired a student walk-out, participants expressed sadness, confusion and renewed resolve upon finding that the horribly backward white supremacist thought to have done this was, in fact, black. School Superintendent Keith Marty reported the troubling conclusion of the district’s investigation. “The..
In the era of blogs and podcasts and independent, streaming news, I’ve been hesitant to agree when people blame “the media” for our problems. Personally, I can’t imagine taking CNN or MSNBC’s word for anything. I certainly don’t agree with everything I hear on Fox and I can’t imagine slogging through a daily diet of..
