Knowledge Is Power I have long been fascinated with how tenaciously authorities have worked throughout history to deny books, and even the ability to read, to particular segments of their populace. Or, they have chosen to make the written word…
A few months ago, the federal government announced it was appropriating 17.5 billion dollars to build ten new nuclear power plants by 2030, created solely for the purpose of generating enough additional electricity to power the rapidly burgeoning, and troublingly…
Get Thee to a Nunnery In Act Three of Hamlet, the young prince says to Ophelia, “Get thee to a nunnery, go. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of…
Before I begin, I want to honor and commemorate my incredible Sacramento Chief of Staff, Carol Wallisch, who passed away last Sunday. For fourteen years, she was the calm in every storm, the encouragement when others said “you can’t do…
What We Were Not Albert Camus was a political journalist, novelist (The Stranger and The Plague) and essayist known for his absurdist work. In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was thinking of a quote attributed to him this…
Zeus’ Law Recently, I became one of the millions around the world who have seen Christopher Nolan’s new retelling of the ancient tale of The Odyssey. I was particularly touched by one central theme running throughout the film, the recounting of…
Historian and futurist, Nils Gilman, wrote a piece earlier this year in his substack, “Small Precautions”, positing that, although the words “secret police” tend to conjure up images of the Gestapo or the Stasi or the KGB, should we place…
In the late 70s, when I first became involved with the Sojourn Shelter for Battered Women and Their Children, the first thing co-founder Ariana Manov did was to take all of us volunteers through an in-depth training on the wide-spread…
In trying to write that portion of my life that intersected with our global experience of the pandemic, I couldn’t seem to get the phrase “she’s come all undone” out of my head. Everything we took for granted had begun…
The Land of Broken Toys In each of the continuing films of Pixar’s Toy Story franchise, we have been introduced, in several ways, to the fates of broken toys. In Toy Story 1, we meet the mutant toys, who have been broken and…
As America was fighting its war against the British in 1812, the commander of Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Major George Armistead, commissioned a local seamstress named Mary Pickersgill to sew a large flag to fly over the citadel. Bringing together…
There are two prevailing theories about the origin of the term “face the music”, a phrase widely used to express the experience of having to face the consequences of your actions and accept the punishment. The first theory stems from…
Weak Tea I don’t often find myself asking AI about the behavior of men who might be insecure about their masculinity. (How’s that for an opening sentence?) However, I just couldn’t help myself when I began to add up the…
I could see that people all around the world were becoming alarmed at the negative direction our country’s leadership was heading when I Googled “signs of a dictatorship” and so many American sites showed up, I couldn’t possibly read them…
On Thursday, May 21st, as almost everyone breathing in this country knows, Stephen Colbert aired his last live show on CBS. The cowardly, obedient new dictatorship at the network, overseen by the latest toady, Bari Weiss, decided that Colbert was…
