Engaging Life with Courage and Intelligence
The good news is that we will not need to file our tax returns within a few years. That should make former Speaker Paul Ryan happy! The bad news is that a little-known corporation recently energized by Trump and DOGE will know everything about you, and thus, there will be no reason to report to…
It is painfully obvious that the standards for truth have declined in America since 2015. Anyone who believes otherwise is certifiably delusional. Instead of making America great again, the MAGA movement has weakened America by converting public discourse into a chaotic propaganda war. We have all fallen down the rabbit hole of mendacity. Instead of…
The word truthiness crept into the English language in 2005. It was coined by the satirical comedian Stephen Colbert. Truthiness denotes something to be true without any supporting facts or evidence. It was accepted as “truth” because it felt true or desired to be true. Truthiness is based on a person’s quick-firing gut instinct. Unlike…
The chaos of the Trump Administration’s tariff war is already causing importers and exporters to halt shipments worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic caused factories and most supply chains to freeze for extended periods. Have we forgotten the empty shelves of toilet paper? Do we remember the hoarding behavior? We can expect a similar experience by this…
We have all heard a joke similar to this one: A doctor, Elon Musk, a little boy, and a priest were flying on a small private plane. Suddenly, the plane developed engine trouble. Despite the pilot’s best efforts, the plane started to go down. Finally, the pilot grabbed a parachute and yelled to the passengers…
It is too bad Carl Sagan is not around today. He was an outstanding scientist and a great communicator. In 1980, Sagan developed and narrated a 13-part PBS television series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Sagan was not only a television personality and scientist but also an outstanding educator and author. One of his lasting contributions…
This is an updated article from March 2025. Who are America’s Christian Nationalists, and why are they merging angry, gutter politics with matters of the divine? As a prelude to my inquiry, I found a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “An eye for an eye will only make the world blind.” A faithful Christian following the…
I cut my teeth on mainframe computers, the behemoths of the early days of automation. In 1972, central processing units required huge air conditioners that circulated under raised flooring. Disk drives that stored 200 megabytes were larger than commercial refrigerators and cost $37,000 or $185 per megabyte. Today’s computers and disk drives are infinitely smaller…
The 1956 book When Prophecy Fails is a social psychology classic that examines the aftermath of the Chicago UFO religious group, the Seekers, who believed the world was about to end. The book’s authors study what the group members did when the apocalypse did not occur. It takes extraordinary mental tricks to recover after predicting…
America has had a few very intractable problems that tied our society in knots. In the 19th century, it was slavery. After the Civil War, the most significant issues revolved around economic prosperity and inequality. We’ve had many economic ups and downs with winners and losers. Ironically, both are now unhappy. The losers are resentful,…