Nullius in verba
Mayor Tim Keller’s election victory last week in Albuquerque was, indeed, a mandate. Sixty-two percent of city voters cast their ballot for an energy-neutral city; for an immigrant-friendly city; for women’s equality; for a politician not at odds with dominant scientific opinion on climate; and for someone who believes in decent, competent law enforcement. They […]
When the Trump Administration okayed the release of a massive federal study on human-caused climate change that contradicted the core absurdity of Republican anti-climate change ideology, many Americans were left scratching their heads. Was the White House sending a signal of a fundamental policy change in the works? Was bureaucratic infighting about to see the […]
If there are any verities left in this cockamamie world of ours they might be that in New Mexico voters have never really cottoned to candidates who they see as playing dirty, and that no one ever got very far trusting the federal government to keep its promises when it comes to nuclear weapons and […]
(This week, a poem during a brief column hiatus.) CHASTITY The clean of heart are not absent of any taint, nor free of rage, nor loosed from wanton teetering into what temptation really is — doing what you know you would not want to do when you know who you really are. The chaste, […]
Charles Darwin read John Milton’s Paradise Lost four or five times as he journeyed around the southern hemisphere on the HMS Beagle gathering insights that would lead to his theory of evolution. It was inspiring for me to read of Darwin’s great adventure again at the start of the mayoral election runoff in Albuquerque between […]
What is the patriarchy? It is, in part, a set of ruling class privileges reserved solely for the male of the species. Women in power roles do not share the inner sense of entitlement that goes with the supreme fiction of the “God-given rights” of males, which are the final extension of the moral abyss […]
Philosopher Bertrand Russell spent much of his long life as a public thinker exploring what we now call cognitive dissonance, the tendency to replace unsavory contradictions in ourselves with more palatable fictions, or outright self-deceptions, or inner lies. As a British Lord who witnessed four ferocious wars ending with Vietnam, Russell was particularly interested in […]