Engaging Life with Courage and Intelligence
A quote from a Texas medical doctor: The doctor did not mince words. “When nobody wants to train in Texas, as the physicians get older and retire, there will be no ob-gyns in the state,” she told me. “And that’s when you’ll really see maternal mortality go up.” At the time, I was reporting on…
This post was written on December 6, 2024 Why is our Country in Chaos? Long before the 2024 election, I wondered why the American psyche was experiencing a dumpster fire. Friends and relatives stopped talking to each other. Some Americans seemed so foreign to me that I thought either they or I had entered an…
Preface While contemplating the divided states of America, I discovered an interesting theory of political behavior called the horseshoe theory. This horseshoe thesis helps explain why American centrists have lost political battles to fringe fanatics over the last 25 years, although 60 to 80 percent of Americans are centrists. I will attempt to place this…
What do these two Renaissance gentlemen have in common besides their ruffled white collars and facial hair? Although one was a politician and the other a scientist, they both studied and experimented with the forces of alignment, repulsion, and attraction. Introduction Are magnetism and politics analogous? We have all watched a magnet “magically” attract metal…
Let’s forget politics for a moment and think about physics. William Gilbert and Galileo Galilei are regarded as the two founders of experimental physical science. The common scholarship of their time was largely non-experimental. Scholars read Greek and Latin texts (including the Bible) to discover the ancient “truth” by logic and inference. “Truth” was considered…
Political figures and movements seek to attract others to get them to support their movement. They seek to rally compliant followers to their political magnetic pole just as the poles of Gilbert’s magnets force compliant metal objects to align their electrons in the same direction. An effective political leader or movement persuades agreeable and susceptible…
The French philosopher Jean Pierre Faye was the first to develop the horseshoe magnet theory of politics in 2002. He proposed that the extreme left and extreme right were not on opposite ends of the political continuum. He called our attention to the fact that both poles were equally far from the political center but…
Humans (including Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc.) existed for millennia in small hunter-gather groups. Each group made up its own behavioral rules and language or grunts. About 10,000 years ago, some homo sapiens put down roots and invented agriculture. These farmers no longer roamed around exclusively looking for wild food and game. These agricultural pioneers created communities…
The American colonists took the momentous action of cutting their ties with their autocratic British “protectors” in 1776. Their effort was ultimately successful and allowed them to create a new form of government. This new form of government was based on several foundations, such as a) rule by the people, b) the rule of law,…
Proctology and history are probably two of the least favorite majors in graduate school. They both study the ebb and flow of things and are the first to recognize when an eruption is about to occur. Since I know nothing about proctology and want to avoid its subject matter, I will focus on the history…