If you read only two articles about the current situation in Ukraine, choose the opinion piece by Thomas Friedman, “We Have Never Been Here Before,” and a brief profile of the Ukrainian president, by Franklin Foer, titled “A Prayer for Volodymyr Zelensky.” …

On February 4, 2022, at a meeting in Salt Lake City, the Republican National Committee (RNC) passed a resolution censuring Representatives Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) for taking part in the House investigation of the assault on our nation’s Capitol January 6, 2021. …

In the January 2, 2021 call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, you could hear Trump pause when he said: “”What I want to do is this. I just want to find…” And you could visualize him consulting his notes, probably from a list of bullet points, probably notes…

A loud-mouthed minority of well-armed “patriots” will participate in whatever conflict emerges with a claim to be the successor of the Jan. 6 insurrection. But there’s a quieter majority, equally well-armed, that could cut either way. Those who think they might find little resistance from their neighbors in pulling off Civil War II ought to think again. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was no surprise to journalists who managed to wander outside the DC Beltway. Their observation was often based on the prevalence of Trump signs along rural roads and the streets of small-town neighborhoods in the flyover states. …

It has become obvious that Democrats need to win the 2022 midterm elections overwhelmingly. And continue to win overwhelmingly. Election oversight by Republican state legislatures going forward is bringing us to the point where American democracy cannot survive anything short of overwhelming Democratic victories. And even then it could be touch and go. — Robert Kagan is one of those conservatives who left the Republican party after Trump became the presidential nominee in 2016 (Wikipedia bio here). And his opinion piece in the Sept. 23 issue of The Washington Post is one of those narratives in which every sentence rings in the mind like…

A recent study elevates our understanding of metabolism throughout life — offering some real surprises. And an organic disruption of our normal metabolism might relate to the “systemic dysfunction” that Nathan Peirce points out in his post below. His post, however, is not about metabolism per se, but the current…

What would an ideal world look like? I’m not ordinarily drawn to political theory to any level deeper than a brief musing. But a friend, Nathan Peirce, described his idea of Utopia the other day and I found myself engrossed in something more like cogitation. …

Back in June I saw a tweet from Christopher Mellon, who needs no introduction for those who follow UAP, an abbreviation that replaced UFO (for me, officially) on December 16, 2017, when the New York Times published an article on the subject. And the abbreviation UAP wasn’t even in the…

One thing we need to remember is that the Taliban are Afghans. Most media coverage I’ve seen paints them as some sort of invading force. The Taliban ran the country from 1996 through 2001. For the past 20 years, they’ve been hanging around in rural areas, fighting and killing Americans…