11/15/12 Secession!! What???

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…

10/19/12 CLL Blog? Yes, It Still Is!

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…

10/18/12 Just the Facts, Please . . . Just the Facts

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,…

10/13/12 Nobel Peace Prize . . . It Ain’t What It Used To Be

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…

10/8/12 Nobel Laureate Economists and Peanuts

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…

9/8/12 Speculating about Things I Wonder About

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,…

9/1/12 The Coolness of Neil Armstrong

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.…

8/17/12 Rubbish and Balderdash

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…