There seem to be lots of petitions floating around among the states calling for secession. The last time I looked in to this it seems that things did not go well for the states that actually seceded, nor did they go well for the states that committed to the union. It was just a horrible…

I’m not a reviewer. You’ve heard me say so before, right here. I suspect that if I were asked to write a review, the person asking might be reluctant to ask me to do so again, because I might be heavy handed because the role of a reviewer is not one that I relish. I…

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French politician, historian, diplomat, and political thinker. He was also a survivor of the Reign of Terror, just avoiding his own execution when Robespierre lost his head. He and a companion were sent to America in 1831 by the French government on a diplomatic mission, ostensibly to study and observe…

I started this blog to write about my adventures in dealing with cancer. It was good for me to have done that, because nearly all of my angst and fears just vanished into the ether as I wrote about it. Three years ago I had just finished round three of six rounds of chemotherapy. November…

Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Talleyrand was the inventor of modern diplomacy and the cloaked language still used by career diplomats today. Talleyrand served King Louis XVI, served during the French Revolution and the Republic afterward,…

In 1893, upon reading a French newspaper obituary for his brother, Swedish arms manufacturer, chemist, inventor of modern smokeless gun-powder, and the inventor of Dynamite, Alfred Nobel, seeing himself labeled as “The Merchant of death”, was a bit concerned about how he might be viewed through the lens of posterity. Like many wealthy industrial barons…

I’ve never won a Nobel Prize. I’ve never won any prize, come to think of it, except a banjo contest, once, in the late 70’s. Winning a local banjo contest and being a Nobel Laureate in Economics are hardly the same. I am thankful for that. Playing a banjo requires considerably more skill than being…

I love to speculate about things I wonder about. I also love to wonder about things I speculate about. The two things are different, sharing some similarities, but ultimately the roots of wonder run much deeper than speculation. I have a penchant for speculation as all humans do when we don’t have all the facts,…

Neil Armstrong quietly passed away on August 25. The news media has been sort of quiet about it, in my opinion, though maybe not in Neil’s. Like everyone else who had a TV, I was riveted to it in July of 1969 watching Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon.…

The election is certainly heating up, and along with it the campaign rhetoric. It is getting tiresome to me. So may half-truths are being thrown about by both sides, and add to that the acerbic, invective half-truths paid for by those taking full advantage of the Citizens United decision and we are destined to have…