Nullius in verba
Though sloth plagues us all, intellectual sloth, along with censorship in all its many forms — from the repeal of net neutrality to blatant redaction to SLAPP suits against journalists — is the enemy within as far as democracy is concerned. Without an “informed electorate,” as quaint phrasing put it in the ‘50s, democracy is […]
Killing in self-defense or in a war — those are the only forms of homicide that our laws sanction and that our culture imbues, on occasion, with respect. All other kinds of murder we loathe or profess to loathe as moral abominations, but not the most premeditated kind of killing there is: vengeance murder by […]
What would happen to Albuquerque if the Southwest suffered a double whammy from climate change — rising seas on the West Coast and a mega drought in the Colorado River and Rio Grande Basins? Would we see a migration of the dispossessed from California and the big cities that depend on the Colorado River, Tucson, […]
All dirty tricksters know about the indelible damage wrought by making false accusations. Our trickster-in-chief is a master at it. As the predominant “birther,” he falsely accused his predecessor of being an alien and therefore illegitimate as a president. He falsely accused his opponent in the last election, “crooked Hilary,” of being a criminal. And […]
When President Trump appeared recently to take the side of rigorous gun control advocates and opposed the GOP’s long history of kowtowing to the gun industry and the NRA, sensing the political spoils in public fury over yet another school massacre, the prospect of even acknowledging the president’s seeming prudence unsettled large parts of the […]
Have you ever gone into the market, or bank, or movie theater, or even your classroom, and felt that queasy wondering of “what if” some crazy guy with an automatic weapon just happens to take it into his head to start shooting in here? We normally dismiss such dark musings as soon as they show […]
When the national political scene becomes so rancid that not even news junkies can stand to pay too much attention to it, the disgust factor can infect one’s attention to local issues, too. In fact, local issues suffer from almost any conflict with national news, especially when national news is vile, loathsome AND packaged as […]