With Thanksgiving just around the corner, I’m pressed to remember all the things for which I should be thankful. And there are many.

First, I am alive. While perhaps insignificant in a planetary or galactic sense, it’s quite something for which to be thankful in a personal sense. I’ve often wondered what not being alive would be like, and at least in one key sense, I suspect it would mean no more sensory delights or adventures. Then again, if passing is really just that, perhaps there ...

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...

“AN eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.” How many eyes and teeth does it take to satisfy one hurt person’s desire for revenge? The answer: an infinite number, as one revenge begats another. Add hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of personal revenge desires and what do you have? Today’s world, a stage upon which literally untold numbers of revenge desires being acted out, in the process, creating new ones. The problem, of course, is how to stop it.

“Turning the o...