Dear Readers, The Mercury Messenger is still on a summer holiday hiatus to recharge and regroup. The column will reappear June 12. In its place, a poem for laughter and sanity. Thanks for your interest and many comments. -V.B. Price Christmas 2016 There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and […]
Columns
FIVE REASONS WHY DESPAIR IS NO GOOD
Dear Readers, The staff of the Mercury Messenger will be taking an early summer holiday to recharge and regroup. Perhaps we’ll even come to believe in sanity once again. The hiatus will last two weeks. The column will reappear June 12. In its place, the Messenger will publish two suites of poems instead. Thanks for […]
La Vida Loca and the Illusion of Rationality
It’s always been a crazy life. The President doesn’t have a monopoly on self-induced chaos. The monster of history is one long tableau of illusions of rationality. Those demons are lurking in all of us. It’s just that we don’t have the codes to nuclear Armageddon at our fingertips. Crazy life is at home everywhere. […]
State Controlled Health Care: A Balkanized America
Even though the House Republican’s forced starvation of health care for the vulnerable, known as the American Health Care Act (AHCA), will undergo many changes in the coming weeks, and even though the U.S. Senate is bound to file off some of its most wicked burrs slashing away at almost everyone’s life line, the Republican […]
Uranium Poisoning, Downwinders, and the Age of Sciencephobia
Nuclear testing and uranium mining during much of the cold war and its lunatic arms race left New Mexico, the Four Corners Region, and some say the whole country, more or less, contaminated by blast fallout from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and airborne mining dust that has sickened and killed, and is still killing, […]
Hate, Sadism, Mob Psychology: Personal Demons to Genocide
It’s been said that all of us have our prejudices. Perhaps that’s true. But few of us gain pleasure or gratification from causing people physical pain, psychological torment, humiliation and fear for their lives just because they belong to a group we choose to persecute. That sense of gratification from causing pain in others is […]
What Matters Now? Clean Water and Higher Education
There’s a numb helplessness, a kind of gray anesthetic fog that’s settling over the political landscape these days. National politics is a nightmare of clowns and distracted groundskeepers sweeping up what the Elephants leave behind. But the piles are getting too big and no one really knows what to do with them. And so there’s […]