First Blog

What’s good about the world?   We’re not looking for miracles or final results. We are looking for improvement.   Let’s not look at the world we don’t have now, but look more at the far and recent past where almost nothing was possible, available, accessible, and the like.  Our list does not include everyone everywhere.   Progress is not constant nor uniform.   In some places forward steps come in leaps while in others backward steps seem the rule.   With all we hear daily of riots here, wars there, violence in the streets, intrigue in the palace, assassinations,   subversions, perversions, and all others, we take a pause and consider what we have is far, far beyond the situations of almost all only a century or two ago.       We now live in a world where most people --- Have some civil rights. Have basic schooling. Have machines to make life easier. Have food produced by an agricultural bounty. Have some rights to practice a religion of choice. Are neither s

I have long, as in long-in-the-tooth, tried to determine changes in the American society over several decades of observing. Today’s topic about is about one of them, lies and liars.   First, technology dominates the world scene, but reliance on knowledge has been diminished by instantly recovered resources. “Let’s look it up on the WIKI,” is a statement we often hear and rely upon.   Me too. So many say “I’ll look it up if I need it,” not understanding if they don’t know (of) it, they will not know to look it up.   Many machines dominate our world, most of which we cannot understand.   Repair your TV?   Impossible.   This skill was lost nearly 50 years ago.   However, not technological in any way is a rarely mentioned advent of all large civilizations, is that of large numbers and anonymity and loss of community. Anonymity allows countless outrages against us – from terror to thievery, and even to perversion.   Indeed, anonymity allows internal terrorists to breed unnot