Brain-Shaming
Pay attention to the socio-cultural wars, and you'll hear the word privilege a fair bit. Privilege used to be an innocuous word, used at times to denote honor and humility ("it's my privilege to stand before you today"), to identify benefits associated with a...
Let’s Ban Ice Cream
There's a meme bouncing around the political blogosphere that says we need to demand the minimum wage be raised because Walmart. The rationale goes like this: The government provides various safety nets regarding health care and other basics, including programs like...
A Petition
I'd like to propose an effort to disseminate some critical, woefully under-reported information about a dangerous chemical substance that many of us consume daily. Given the power of petitions and the heed that combined voices are given by politicians, policy-makers...
The Power To Kill
It was announced yesterday that the jury considering the penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the recently convicted Boston Marathon bomber, elected to sentence him to death. The reaction I've read on social media has been overwhelmingly favorable, with many expressing...
Free Passes
Late last year, Rolling Stone magazine published a story written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, titled "A Rape On Campus," that described how a woman, identified as "Jackie," was raped by several members of a fraternity at the University of Virginia (UVA) as part of an...
Tea Baggers and The Prophet
There was a shooting yesterday in Garland Texas. Two men who were allegedly offended by an intentionally provocative "Draw Mohammed" event showed up at that event with body armor, rifles and murderous intent. They exchanged fire with police and security, and got...
That Pesky Constitution
Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, former Senator from NY, former Secretary of State, former and current candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for President, made a rather stark proclamation last week. At her first official campaign event, held in Monticello,...
Cultures Of Dependence
Just a few weeks before I was born, Lyndon Baines Johnson gave his first State of The Union address since becoming President upon the death of John F. Kennedy. The full text of the address is a fascinating read, especially within the context of LBJ's...
The Founders Missed One
Buried within the hyperventilating about Indiana's recently enacted religious freedom law - a law that says (per USA Today): the government cannot "substantially burden" a person's ability to follow their religious beliefs, unless it can prove a compelling interest in...
The Problem With Purity
For several years now, possibly since the 2010 mid-term election and the ascendance of the Tea Party's influence in Congress, Democrats have been gleefully enjoying what they call a "civil war" within the Republican party. Prior to and concurrent with that particular...
Natural Nonsense
A friend and former employee who has gone all-in on healthy living and all things natural has been sharing a variety of links and news stories with me of late - stories decrying GMO foods, Big Pharma, chemotherapy and Monsanto as the greatest evils of modern life and...
Hillary and the Herd
It doesn't seem particularly far-fetched to presume that people with statist tendencies have an affinity for being told what to think and who to follow. People who believe that more government involvement in their lives and the lives of others is a good thing should...
Rock the Vote
The latest bit of chum making its way around conservative blogs and riling up the already riled up is an idea being floated by President Obama regarding making voting mandatory, with compliance probably enforceable by fines. While he acknowledged that this would be a...
Accidental Racism
Just in from an alternate universe that we might call the left wing of the left wing comes a declaration that the three-meal-a-day routine that is the norm of daily life is racist. This deep insight comes courtesy of Kiera Butler, a senior editor at Mother Jones. The...
Good is Bad?
I came across an interesting observation on a political page yesterday. The commenter asked why it seemed that the people most certain that the science of global warming was settled and irrefutable were oftentimes vocally anti-vaccine and anti-GMO. At first blush, it...
Dysfunction Doesn’t Excuse Dictatorship
An effort to audit the Fed, spearheaded by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, has been gaining momentum since the Republican mid-term election victories this past November. It has, apparently, achieved enough popularity to prompt the folks at the Federal Reserve to...
Why So Metric?
I've long grown accustomed to the notion that the metric system is easier and more practical than the English system of measurement used here in the US. We do numbers in base 10, so it's far easier to contemplate meters, centimeters and kilometers than it is to go...
Climate Change As Religious Dogma
Earlier today, an internet friend of an internet friend posted this comment: So they have a truth which is unalterable, it's beneath them to debate with outsiders, they have texts full of dire prophecies I mean predictions that never seem to come true. They sell...
Cultural Butterflies
I caught a documentary about the late great rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix last night. I knew parts of his story, and of course am familiar with his music and on the effect it had on the British and American music scene in the late 1960s. I was also reminded that he was...
The Narcissism of Small Differences
A century ago, Sigmund Freud coined the phrase the narcissism of small differences. He built upon previous works to postulate the phenomenon that: it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged...
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