Not enough coffee in the world
Thoughts over the first cup of Joe. We endured eight years of Reagan. Hell, we endured Nixon. We old people are flexible. We're still here after W. Coffee... We can survive President Trump. He'll only...
View ArticleMore Fun in the Bible Belt
Local CBS affiliate WVLT in Knoxville had a piece on state Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, who has suggested Christians in the state apply for concealed carry permits in light of the Oregon campus shootings. I...
View ArticleKilling Me Softly
I believe in civility. Even at this late fractured time in American politics, I try to follow weemama's advice; ultimately, is what you say kind? But reading some of the hundreds of comments following...
View ArticleThoughts About My Father
One recurrent theme I have touched on in several of my diaries is how we are born into an historical context, into a world whose recent events did shape our young new lives. For reasons having to do...
View ArticleA Tale of Two Churches
Attn: Church politics and the potential for recriminations necessitates a delicate disguising of names and places. More than one person's job is at stake, not to mention innocent lives. Drama?...
View ArticleWhat We're Really Good At
I see why climate scientists are depressed. A six degree warmer world will literally be hell on earth. Think methane fireballs arcing across the sky. So, we beshat our own nests. We poisoned our...
View ArticleThe Expression of Meta
For Your Consideration: There is a fine line between free speech and political correctness.Given and acknowledged: The founder, Markos Moulitsas, is within his rights to to establish the kind of...
View ArticleThe Bureaucratization of Fear
First off, the title. I am suggesting that fear politics have become entrenched in our governmental system. Somewhat like a fungus which is difficult to eradicate, it has side effects such as paranoia...
View ArticleAn Ugly Time In An Ugly Place
I will start at the beginning. An ugly place, any ugly place, can have been an attractive place in an earlier, or even a relatively recent time. Good so far? As far as ugly times go, I won't quote...
View ArticleThe Powers That Be
Crystal ball predictions are by definition opinions, unless you really subscribe to the notion that clairvoyance and esp are real. Not my circus. Anyway, I shall now imagine an entity that I will call...
View ArticleA Prediction and A Poll
Going out on a limb here, I realize, but here is a prediction. The general election in November will be won by someone who isn't even running as of this week. No evidence other than the possibility...
View ArticleMea Maxima Culpa
Well the Major League baseball season is underway, and our Granddaughter's softball season also underway. She catches, and has gotten pretty good at nabbing foul balls that go off the bat and behind...
View ArticleUrgent request for Updates From PA
As I write this open carry groups are massing to “patrol" a Trump rally at Schenley Park in Pittsburgh. No one has posted anything that I noticed, so I am asking any Pittsburghers out there on dKos to...
View ArticleAnother Turn Around Diary
Yes, it's mine. I was never one to say that Hillary was not qualified to be president, though my reasons might have been a tad cynical. She understands the political system, and how it works. In other...
View ArticleRevisiting the Reverend Wright
I've been thinking back on the early Obama years, when the radical right got all fired up over the President's friendship with the pastor of a Chicago church, a Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It transpired...
View ArticleThe Trump Years
Okay, poll time. No more time for Monday morning quarterbacking. It's the day after the election. For whatever reason, the Donald has won the election. And for whatever reason, Mr. Trump has made it to...
View ArticleThe View From Here In East Tennessee
Toxic. Used to describe a person who is tainted by a subconscious malevolence or psychosis that affects the lives of those who come into contact with them (from the online Urban Dictionary). The...
View ArticleThis has ceased being funny.
The pee jokes are past being funny. The cute pictures of a militarily dressed Putin holding up a Trump baby are past being funny. The twitter President is past being funny. Senator Diane Feinstein said...
View ArticleThe 25th Of January
I write this on Wednesday morning, the 25th of January, 2017. It is the fifth full day of the Presidency of Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States. He was inaugurated on Friday the 20th,...
View ArticleA Journal of the Plague Years: March 2017
We need a Defoe, or a Boswell. I am neither, but I find myself inhabiting such a surreal landscape of post-truth and alternate facts that I feel compelled to set down my observations of what is...
View ArticleSabre Rattling
Some nations are better at it than others. North Korea is in the big leagues. Iraq during the Gulf War wasn’t too shabby. The United States, on the other hand, hasn’t the finesse to pull it off, due to...
View ArticleBeyond, There Be Dragons
I need a political counselor, or therapist, whatever. I’m floundering in a sea of my own ignorance, oriented around two dilemmas. The first seems to have answered itself. I was thinking, earlier this...
View ArticleOpen Up The Camps!
We need to mobilize on a national scale an effort to open up the child detention camps to inspection by the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and our own representatives. Call...
View ArticleA Space Odyssey: "My God, It's Full Of Lunatics!"
I am frightened. I am concerned that my grip on reality, my sense of prioperception - up, down, forward, backward, past, future - has become untethered. For an ever so brief moment I enjoyed our...
View ArticleFriday Night Musings On WWIII
Most of what follows is comprised of news tidbits and factoids culled from journalistic hiccups over the past several years, as well as my always incomplete historical education ranging back to the...
View Article... One of the finest men I have ever known."
Mr. Trump,I will get straight to the point. When I read your defense of Judge Kavanaugh as being "one of the finest men you have ever met," I let out an inarticulate burst of noise that woke my wife...
View ArticlePlace Your Bets
It is just one hour away from T***p’s Saturday announcement. Conventional wisdom (i.e. CBS News...) says it will be an end the shutdown proposal, but come on, who the hell really knows. In the spirit...
View ArticleDebating Democracy With Aristotle
I have been told many times, usually with affection, that I am the type of person that doesn't know enough to get in out of the rain. I plead guilty, and I date my impractical streak to that day as a...
View Article2020: A Disaster In The Making
I have an unsettling prediction to make, and by all that's holy I hope I am wrong. By rights climate change should be the top agenda for the 2020 Presidential election cycle. Some might argue for...
View ArticleHow To Take A Brain Bath : or, Eight Simple Steps To Restore Mental Health In...
Number One: Take care of your physical health.Number Two: Similar to using Methadone to get off heroin, substitute a philosophy for a religion, i.e. Logical Positivism for Advaita. /s ?Number...
View ArticleHow Do We Confront Evil?
How do we confront evil?How in the name of all that is holy do we do this?This question has an urgent immediacy to me in this moment of outrage and shame regarding the mistreatment of immigrant...
View ArticleThe Climate Movement Just Needs Better Marketing
90% of ground insects (ants, beetles, spiders, etc.) have disappeared from the rainforests of Puerto Rico and other tropical Caribbean locales.50% of North American birds have disappeared over the last...
View ArticleThe Last Elephant
Lately it seems that we have been inundated with climate related images of dead or dying creatures from around the world, their suffering inflicted by rapidly changing environmental conditions. Flesh...
View ArticleRed Menace Redux
After reading the diary by Joan McCarter on the systematic dismantling of our nation’s cyber security forces, here, I got to thinking of just how ill-equipped we are to deal with the 2020...
View ArticleThe Great American Pogram
I’ve taken the advice to heart. I’ve seen it suggested many times on diaries here. Those of us (most?) who suffer from *rump fatigue need to occasionally take time out to be good to ourselves, to tune...
View ArticleSomalia: A Lesson Learned
Thinking back on the Black Hawk Down disaster many years ago in Somalia, what stuck in my mind back then and what remains with me today, is the description of Somalia at that time, and which continues...
View ArticleUp For Grabs
It’s in the interest of our country that I don’t pay my taxes this year. It’s in the interest of our country that I defraud my creditors. It’s in the interest of our country that I traffic in the...
View ArticleCritical Decisions
Choices. We are, all of us, faced with choices every day. This being an election year, we are faced with choices of a more critical nature. Recently many here on dKos have announced their choice of...
View ArticleCovid-19 and Health Insurance
I’m in a bit of a panic, so I haven’t done a search for any diaries that may have covered this topic already. Our son works in IT at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. A co-worker of his has...
View ArticleHow Simple It Was
The end is in sight.The end that was planned for us. The end that was by design.The crowning success of a psychological war.They have made us forgetwhat is was like in the past.What used to be...
View ArticleA Not So Easy Choice
With the suggestion that *rumpf will attempt to buy the November election with an even bigger stimulus check for Americans, what to do with my next check is an easy choice. I know immediately what I...
View ArticleI Don’t Mind Being A Test Case
I came back this evening and noticed bfskinner’s diary is gone, as well as several community posts expressing sympathy and regret over his situation. Maybe a lack of interest bumped them off the...
View ArticleBroken
He sat on a park bench at dusk, facing a soccer field, lost in thought. Trees already leafless, the air was chilled but dry. Thinking of the hypothetical of being able to undo a single past decision, a...
View ArticleA Very Different Christmas
2020 has triggered my anxiety and irritability levels to the point where everyone expects me to chill. They may be right, so when my son and our granddaughter came over for Christmas eve, I did my best...
View ArticleTennessee Update: Flyspace Around Nashville
Not really a surprise, but very suggestive of all the investigatory depth around what’s going on. Governor Bill Lee has request President Trump to declare a state of emergency in middle Tennessee, and...
View ArticleShelter From The Storm
The events of the last few days have sent me scurrying for shelter from the storm. Watching cute animal videos wasn’t quite doing it for me, so I retreated into some high school memories for a spell,...
View ArticleComplexity
It seems like everything is up for grabs in this newyear of 2021. So I have decided, what the hell,just do it, go for the gusto, grab the golden ring.Reach way up there, and solve the meaning of...
View ArticleTiny Things
The University of Tennessee Forest Resources Research and Education Center is a 250 acre property in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Most of the work undertaken here would not be visible to the casual visitor....
View ArticleEarth Day 2021
Earth Day 2021. I may remember this day as the first day of the rest of my life. Absolutely a cliche. Our retirement has brought us back to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a peculiar little town that is...
View ArticleA Disease Called Capitalism
I should like to start this piece of personal observation with a disclaimer. I have no expertise in political science or economics. I have attempted in the past to read Marx’s Das Kapital and could...
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