THESE are [once again] times that try men's souls (Thomas Paine). All known governments have a rise and a fall. Is this the United States' time to stall, trip and fall? It certainly can seem that way, with all the disruptions surfacing these days, and growing, polarized dissension replacing compromise. There seems to be a craziness bubbling up, as if the simmering pot called America were approaching a boiling point. But is this true? 

It certainly is a reflection of the times in which we live,...

I think some, therefore I must be, well, something. True, however, I can’t help but wonder how much of my thinking is simply want, hope and desire. Or dream for that matter. Is life a long series of unconscious déjà vues, one long jamais vu, or one long hopeless presque vu? In fact, if everything that’s “real” to our senses is, as we’re told by physicists and cosmologists, merely tight packets of vibrating energy, what can we know and trust outside of simple belief?

Actually, in ...

NOW there’s an interesting, amazingly paradoxical word (I nearly wrote “world,” thank you, Dr. Freud for that Freudian slip). To say someone is “in-sane” would logically be the opposite of saying he or she is “insane.” But what is sanity, and who’s to say what it actually means. The online Oxford Languages dictionary defines sanity as “the ability to think and behave in a normal and rational manner,” the key words being “normal” and “rational.” Think for a moment a...

I hear a lot these days about how “unfair” autocratic folks, foreign and domestic, feel they’re being treated these days. The popular saying, “truth hurts” as well as Khaled Hosseini’s famous quote: “better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie” say it all. In my opinion, the best defense against autocracy is truth, exactly what U. S. President Biden seems to be doing to defend against a Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

The problem, even in countries relatively i...