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All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.
According to author James Stewart, lying is a national crisis. This undermines “the ideals of fair play, integrity, and trust to which people of goodwill everywhere aspire,” according to the author, and he’s made a good career out of speaking on this topic. His book “Tangled Webs” is selling well.
But is lying worse than it ever has been, as Steward insists? I think so, but at a slightly different depth than he has plumbed.
Memorial Day is a special holiday, and not just because it honors those who gave their lives for our nation. It was a spontaneous holiday that came about because it seemed necessary more than politically expedient. There was little official about it until long after it was part of our national calendar.
Minnesota will vote in November 2012 on constitutional amendment that will forever ban same-sex marriage in this state. If approved, it will join a few other seemingly random scribblings at the end of our constitution such as the authorization to pay a bonus to Persian Gulf War veterans and a fundamental right to hunt and fish.
The nature of these odd things that don’t appear to belong in a constitution make the intention clear. They also make it obvious how we have to campaign against the amendment – by having a lot of fun with it.
Stop for a moment and look around you. In front of your nose might be the aroma of coffee from Sumatra steaming inside a mug made in China. The table you are sitting at may be from South America or Canada. Your clothes could be made of Egyptian cotton. What do all of these things have in common, other than your life? Nearly all of them spent some time in a metal box, 20 feet by 8 feet by 9 and a half feet tall.
Containerized cargo has changed the world more than any other technology over the last 30 years, maybe or maybe not excluding the internet. Yet few people stop to consider this phenom and what it means
The death of bin Laden may be nothing more than closure to an era for the USofA. However, there are some signs that this could be a new era for our politics that is desperately needed. There is at least a chance that this could be the injection of stark reality that we have needed for some time, a re-focus on the things that really matter.
Only time will tell, of course, but for now there are a lot of unconnected loose ends. They do not make for one coherent thought, at least not yet. Just as I believe history will eventually tell us that this Managed Depression started on September 11th, 2001, the day that we started to fully engage the situation may have been May 1st, 2011.
This won’t make a lot of sense yet. History rarely does when you’re elbows into it.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 