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It’s déjà vu, all over again
This is a sobering moment. And where you come down on what happened yesterday, and over the last week in Iran, depends on how willing you are to suspend your disbelief and accept the narrative fed to you by the administration in Washington DC. One only has to look to recent history. A regime in…
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So much for progress
For most of my life, at least since I developed a mind of my own and thought about such things, I had two unshakeable beliefs. One was that everything will be okay. And I believed that because of the second one – that things are getting better. Progress may not be dramatic or even perceivable,…
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Oh. My. God.
I had a post all written and ready to go for today. I was just polishing it and fact checking a few assertions I had made. It was a fun one for my “curiosity” category about etiquette and how the concept of what is appropriate or proper has changed over time. For example, you’re on…
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Conspiracy Theories
President Donald Trump has promoted one of the most outlandish and unhinged conspiracy theories I have ever heard to his 10 million followers on Truth Social: former president Joe Biden was “executed in 2020” and replaced by robotic clones. Stop and think about that for a moment. Just that. Forget everything else you know about…
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Putting America first does not mean putting humanity last
We have a vice president who is a recent convert to Catholicism and, like Ross Douthat at the New York Times, thinks this qualifies him to tell us what Catholicism is (and what it isn’t). It was JD Vance who was among the last people to see and speak with Pope Francis before he died…
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State of Play
I think most of us for most of our lives have been mostly unaware of politics. By that I do not mean we’ve been ignorant, and obviously it doesn’t apply to people who live and work in that world. We all want lower grocery prices and charges at the gas pump, reasonable health care costs,…
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Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity offers us a way to understand the “hold” MAGA has over so many people. It is important to note at the outset that by “stupidity” he does not mean “dumb.” Rather than a lack of intelligence, he was describing a psychological state where facts don’t matter, where contradictions aren’t recognized,…
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The PEPFAR Crisis
Nine days after the new President of the United States took office and unleashed an unelected billionaire to wreak havoc in American institutions and programs with little or no thought to the real-life consequences for millions of people both in this country and worldwide, I wrote about the impact this clown car of an administration…
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If you don’t have your health, what do you have?
Say what you will about George W. Bush, and I have said plenty, but in 2003 he started the United States President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, better known as PEPFAR. It was the largest global health program focused on a single disease in the history of the world until the COVID-19 pandemic, and as…
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The Canadian Plan
As we brace ourselves for four more years of racist white supremacists like Stephen Miller, a man who always looks like he just ate a baby, occupying senior un-elected positions in the White House advising the man we did elect in probably the greatest act of self-harm imaginable for our country in its history, our…
Your mileage may vary.