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,...

BLOODSPORT is the term for events of spectacle involving violence to the point of bloodletting. While violence and bloodletting are probably as old as humanity, they are said to have became a spectacle with the ancient pre-Roman Etruscans in or around 600 BCE — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi7673 and http://thespectaclesofapuleius.weebly.com/gladiatorial-combats.html#.YrSwcy-B3Fc — and later the Greek Olympics begun in 770 BCE — https://olympics.com/ioc/faq/history-and-or...

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...