Once again the final call is played and American troops withdraw in ignominy from a conflict they should never have been sent to fight. Wasted lives and wasted treasure, hundreds of thousands of civilians converted into collateral damage and the same villains, the cowardly politicians back home, still in play. The ones who deceived the stalwart American public into conflicts not their own, and then, symbolized by one man, first a Senator and now a president, assured that an orderly withdrawal would turn into a rout. …

Almost without regard to political self-identification, it appears that the vast majority of the current population is certain that they are being deliberately deceived by groups with specific, self-serving agendas. And they’re right, truth appears out of reach if one relies on traditional sources. However, non-traditional sources are so varied (and sometimes deceptively controlled by traditional sources) that they are also all too often inaccurate. That leaves us, as individuals, with the task of using our own investigative and cognitive powers to determine for ourselves, based on our own experience and our own common sense, what is more likely than…

An interesting article in RT News this morning may have resulted in a political epiphany (Haiti requested US troops & UN peacekeepers to secure ‘key infrastructure’ after president’s assassination — reports; July 10, 2021). Whatever was “rotten in Denmark” has moved to Haiti. Although truth is no longer relevant and hypocrisy is the rule in creative narration, the bastard child of corrupt pseudo-journalism, the current situation in Haiti takes the cake, and not in a good way, say, the suggestion of Marie Antoinette to the Parisian poor.

The President of Haiti, albeit not recently elected, Jovenel Moïse, who had just…

Robert Heinlein was one of the most famous artists in the genre we call science fiction, fading at times into the realm of fantasy, but also a somewhat avant guard social philosopher with a taboo busting Freudian perspective. His principle characters tended to be cantankerous and overly affectionate but perpetually bickering libertarians. One of his novels, “Stranger in a Strange Land” spawned a religion, albeit an extremely liberal religion.

I enjoyed him a great deal before I started to write myself and then, well I came to find his dialogue (my weak point I’ll admit), stifling and petty and suffocatingly…

Holidays. Strange things.

Generalizing, many are supposed to be festive occasions although all too many deal with profound tragedies. Like Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Or celebrate mass murders, like so many Hebrew feast days. Or, bastardize religious events, like the Easter Bunny and candy and egg hunts.

Fathers’ Day is a strange holiday, like an onion in a sense, with layers of meaning. For functional families it is a happy occasion with a touch of gratitude for sacrifices joyfully made, but functional families are becoming more and more rare. Dysfunction, i.e., functioning in pain, and non-function, are becoming more…

Soooo, ….

It had been a lousy Friday. The worst of my somewhat brief physical sojourn what with being whipped, forced to carry a heavy piece of wood all over town, being whipped again, then nailed to a cross, then, as if that hadn’t been enough, stabbed in the ribs with a spear to see whether or not I’d enjoyed the experience. I hadn’t but Dad had refused to give me a hand. Then I’d been taken down from the cross, sprinkled with herbs, wrapped in linen and sealed in a damp, cold cave. At least it was fairly dry…

Reflections on Shalimar the Clown during a Cold Day in Early Spring

A quote from Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown seems to me to capture the political reality under which we live. Perhaps the reality under which we’ve always lived; at least those of us deluded into thinking we’ve lived in a democracy:

“…in this occult soil the seeds of the future are being planted, and the time of the invisible world will come, the time of the altered dialectic, the time of the dialectic gone underground, when anonymous spectral armies will fight in secret over the fate of the…

Snow sparkles as it falls from a cloud-clad sky; fields, verdant, eons past, now just shades of white on white.

A pale woman, clad in silvery fleece from head to toe, leaves prints on the crinkly ground. Pale steam, streaming through pearly teeth, kisses pallid lips then mingles with swirling mists.

Crystalline trees caked in ice, limbs, too heavy, lie scattered on the frozen ground. Snow covers frozen meres and a frozen tarn, shades of white on white.

A pale old man sits in a snow covered skiff, his hair and beard almost as bleached as the swirling eddies of…