The Social Order, Editorial July 5, 2020
The Social Order, the Social Condition, and the meaning of ‘Social’ itself. The social definition is simple, whether determined by a dictionary in exotic detail or in seemingly understandable catch-phrases like ‘we are all in this together.’...
Reflection of the Past and Present
The Past and Present Flow Together I open chapter XVII of The Duke, set on Oahu in 1963, with the words: “The events of the past two days have so tossed my life atop a rough sea of confusion, accidental circumstance and indecision. Is it possible that I can...
Coronavirus (COVID19) Reflection #4
Reflections on the Coronavirus (COVID19) March 21, 2020 Adapt. The most fundamental and nearly unspoken primary asset and philosophy of the United States Marine Corps, and one I found to be the only place to go, when I was a Marine in combat, to give me any hope of...
Coronavirus (COVID19) Reflection #3
Reflections on the Coronavirus (Covid19) March 20, 2020 I am coming to hate them. I never hated them before, not any of them. Oh, I have not cared from some of the Fox commentators but I never thought much about the anchors. Now I am thinking about them, and not just...
Coronavirus (COVID19) Reflection #2
COVID19 To be made in what image? To be reproduced at who’s direction? The nation is being brought to its knees and the causal factor is being touted as this new virus. But is that it? This nation, if it goes to sleep for the next two to three months, will never...
Reflections on the Coronavirus (COVID19)
Coronavirus (Covid19) March 18, 2020 It becomes ever more draconian, regardless of statistics seeming to indicate that this new virus is much like old ones when it comes to making people very ill or killing them. Right now, as I write this, one of the major leaders of...
Sitting On The Bottom, Looking Down
Dateline: March 16, 2020 Lake Geneva WI Sitting on the Bottom and Looking Down. There is only one direction to go from that orientation. That light up there, when one can take one’s eyes off where they’ve been directed to go by nearly everyone, is the...
I Did The Thing… Vietnam
I did the thing in a country called Vietnam. I went on from there to have a fairly wild and messy but distinguished career in the CIA. How come, after all that, and publishing my story in books and more, I am expected on such social communication sites like this, to...
Hard Rain, Reflection of Life
Hard Rain. Does it cleanse? Does it cause more damage than it takes care of by providing plants and animals with plenty of pure freshwater? Does it flood and cause disease, famine and even death? Water coming down from the sky is almost an allegory for life itself....
In The Name Of The Father..
In the name of the Father… a prayer. A prayer that is as endemic to the Catholic Church as the existence and continuance of the pope. “Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us;” What...
Vietnam Veterans Day, March 29, 2019…a Reflection
Yesterday was Vietnam Veterans Day…and I didn’t give a damn, really. How can the regular public be expected to understand or care about what we went through over in that god-forsaken country and war of the time? They can’t. I was in the Avant Coffee...
The Hustle, The Escalator of Life
The Hustle, The Escalator, The Rush of Life. When you put the brakes on, by going on vacation somewhere far away, traveling abroad for a while, or simply holing up and pulling the cords out of the walls with respect to electronic equipment, you discover that life...
I Don’t Know…
Dateline: Lake Geneva, WI January 21, 2018 I don’t know. That sentence is so much more important in my life than it was when I was younger. My own inability to know or understand some things is so important to me. I live in a world where such self-analysis and...
Where is God?
It’s not easy. It’s not a road fraught with simply easy decisions. The search for meaning in my or your very tiny universe of things you or I control is very complex and constantly threaded through like a bad plaid blanket with beautiful and awful strains...
The Journey of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days. The efforts to bring it into being and the dangers of it, as well as the potential benefits. My question is “will artificial intelligence wander?” We wander, as humans. Much of our work and life force is...
A Pen in Hand, a Gift of Value,
June 10, 2017 Funny how the simple gift of a pen can inspire. The motivation to go on. Do you sometimes go in actual search of that… Or merely sit or lay and wait for that? Let go and let it be a God kind of thing? While I was doing a bit of that, the mail...
Perceptions….. STURGIS, 1993
STURGIS It was 1993, and I was headed from Albuquerque to Madison, Wisconsin. I was driving a 1989 Range Rover with my family. After half the second day on the road we came upon flocks of Harley bike riders going the same way. Tens, hundreds and then thousands of...
Is the Enemy Everywhere…?
Dateline March 31, 2017 Lake Geneva, Wisconsin For some reason I cannot write well this night. I am working on another segment of the Vietnam odyssey, Thirty Days Has September, but came to the river in the bottom of that valley and then lost my way. Not then, but...
IN GOD’S WAY
Walking along on a street called Ke Nui in Hawaii, I found myself lost on this back road in a developed area on a small island where it’s almost impossible to get lost. But there I was. My cell would not work, and I was getting tired of walking around in shower shoes, things not meant for hiking long distances.
Coming in From the Cold
How does one who comes in from the cold (that’s what spies used to call coming home from a mission) explain to fellow Americans that they live in a perpetual state of blissful euphoria punctuated by bouts of fake fear? How does one, who’s ridden the...
AVIATION WEEK and SPACE TECHNOLOGY
Aviation Week and Space Technology is a weekly magazine that every thinking and feeling American should subscribe to.
Why? Oh, because it is a magazine about air travel and space?
HOME IN THE MEADOW, Debbie Reynolds
And so Debbie Reynolds dies too. Her daughter dies and then the mom. For someone old like me, that mom sang Home in the Meadow. for the movie How the West Was Won. That transformation of the old English Greensleeves entranced me as a youngster and it’s lyrics...
PRINCESS LEIA, Carrie Fisher, RIP
Why am I bothered by the loss of Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia? She was the daughter of a giant actress and great crooner plus given just about everything except bliss and happiness. Her book on her life made it to the top of the best seller list. She had it all and...
FAKE NEWS
Why the mass media broadcasts tons of ‘fake news’ and is not held accountable simply because there is no one to hold them accountable. Donald Trump has come closest to being a force to hold them accountable because of the fact that he has tweeted outside...
THE KING
Here’s a direct quote from the two leaders of the current republican party in a communique meant to go out to the entire nation: “Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind. Just...
CHRISTMAS
Appreciation and reflection. That’s Christmas for those who have a body of life experience and some measure of intellect. Thinking about it all. Life itself, the meaning of existence and, in particular, our place in the social order we’ve fashioned for...
BURNING BRIDGES
There are a lot of people mad at me, and some filled with disdain, because I write on here from the heart about what I believe, and it is not what they believe, and others who are simply afraid that I will complicate my life with needless enemies and those seeking my...
THE BROWNING 410
What happened in this last election was a bit of manipulation and a whole lot of anger. And it’s all about the Browning 410 shotgun that my friend in Washington keeps in his back closet. My friend is a great artist who doesn’t know he’s a great...
THE PORSCHE
I helped a guy in Hawaii once. I was helping him run his little bitty but very upscale auto repair shop. He worked on cars I loved, like Ferrari and Porsche. I worked for free and I didn’t even have a car. This guy was a seemingly great expressive and...
A WHITER SHADE OF PALE
“We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels across the floor….I was feeling kind of seasick, and the crowd called out for more….” I have taken the election results harder than anyone in my extended family, anyone I know at work and even...
CARRY ON
I can’t sleep so well and amazingly my appetite is down like I’m on some special diet. I’m sort of a mix inside of a bit of fear, anxiety and broken hope…….but the main element of strangeness is a feeling inside my very center of...
PETER WILSON
Peter Wilson, a local attorney and a friend of mine, died in his sleep last night. He had a magnificently bold but weak heart. He was also one of those very rare humans in that he thought I was a better person and much greater than I really am…..
SHAVED LEMURS
The Supreme Court. Why the House of Representatives, resisting efforts to appoint anyone to fill the vacant U.S. Supreme Court role, has little to do with partisan politics. Say what? Everything is the opposite of what they are saying…..
THE ELECTION and the Cubs
Election and the Chicago Cubs It is Sunday night, which means that we only have a week and a day of this election cycle to go. Can we hack it? What will be the next scandal or investigation, tape or audio recording? Whom will come forth to be famous or to be the...
On the Road Again, FREEDOM TOWER
What I wanted it to be. The monument and museum of the World Trade Center. I wanted it to be quintessential American. I wanted it to be the best of what a Walt Disney might come up with or the Hollywood people who put on the Olympics that year……..
Black Mirror
Black Mirror is out. The third season. The cutting edge ski-fi show so highly acclaimed from England……
HIERONYMUS
Hieronymus Six a.m. comes early in Duluth, Minnesota, when February, the coldest month of a cold winter, begins. It was the first and it was a Saturday morning. I lived in a four story home built by some important person many years earlier. There’d been enough time...
ALPHA
Back when I had to get up in the morning. Now I get up in the morning because I can’t even remember what it was that I got out of sleeping in.
Back then my brilliant wife was in control of the stereo, a stereo capable of blowing anyone and anything out of our small one story home
WITHOUT BARS
There will be no getting together. Of all social fears that exist on the planet, for cultural leaders, people getting together is their greatest fear. Today, with the advent of such magnificent electronic media inventions…..
Chemical Theory
The hall outside the St. Norbert Chemistry Department classroom door saw a lot of traffic. The dark, near ebony, wood and solid stone floor that ran the length of the narrow passage exuded age and class. Student’s passing all did so in silence, carrying piles of...
Monsignor
Fifth grade at Sacred Heart Academy in Duluth, Minnesota wasn’t much different than other Catholic Elementary Schools of its time, except for its location high atop a hill above one of the coldest developed areas in the United States. Other places in Minnesota might...
“Thank the Living Christ”
They hadn’t told me that I was going to make it yet, when my brother came by to visit on his way home. We’d been hit only two weeks apart. The telegram came to me about his injuries, dropped in by a supply chopper late in the day on a place called Ganoi Island in Vietnam…..
Ajinomoto
Ajinomoto To be stuck in Hawaii without any money was a horrible thing for any kid, particularly three white Haole kids, coming from a military family and living in a downtown local area on the fringe of downtown Waikiki. Kapuhulu was what the district was called. I...
Observations of a Global Nature
Dateline: Lake Geneva, WI August 20, 2016 The Olympics are tailing down…… I will miss them. I absolutely love the shots, few as they’ve been of the aerial scenes of that city. Rio is stunning in location. I did’t know, before these games, that...
Starfish Prime, 1962
The July of 1962, on Oahu, was oppressive in more ways than I, and my friends atop Diamond Head, could count. The Sundays came and went, Sunday being the only day of the week that our parents would let us run off and climb the crater wall above Fort Ruger…….
It’s Only Captain Crunch…….
“The cat’s name is Pushkin,” the eight-year-old said. “He’s named after a great Russian who did something a long time ago.” The boy stroked the Russian Blue between his ears, as the cat leaned his head down to pick away at his Fancy Feast…..
Back Dive… the 2016 Olympics Effect?
BACK DIVE…1960 With all of the focus on Olympics 2016 in Rio de Janeiro the past weeks my memory banks are rejuvenated. I reached the pinnacle of one meter diving in 1960, as a graduating sophomore at Thornton Fractional North Township High School in South...
Paris, late 1990’s
I hate Paris. Oh, not the restaurants, the food vendors on the streets or the Louvre. Even the Eiffel Tower and the river are pretty terrific, when it’s not raining or foggy or any of that other French stuff. No, I hate Paris because of how shitty the airport is, how...
Coming Home, 1965
The 1965 pledge class of the ADG Fraternity at St. Norbert College rejected a young man because of a disagreement the fraternity had regarding a pyramid scheme it was conducting all over the campus. In order to prove his point, that the fraternity was doing something federally illegal….
More on The Olympics in Rio…..
The Russians are there, but it’s like they aren’t at all. They finally got in after a huge doping scandal but then couldn’t qualify for anything because, well, they were no longer on dope….
Flowers in Your Hair………..
“Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair…….” Publishing a local weekly newspaper offers me the opportunity to write and Opinion/Editorial each week. Most focus on very current events and we all know 2015 and 2016 have provided tons of...
2016 Summer Olympics, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Fun in the sun at Rio de Janeiro? Dateline: Rio de Janeiro, Friday August 8, 2106 The Olympics in Rio is underway, in spite of how miserably the mass media has tried to kill it. From the slums of the downtown Rio area, the foul water and bad food. Russian team...
Reflections of 1993……….
1993 Yearly Inflation Rate USA 2.96% Year End, Close Dow Jones Industrial Average 3654 Interest Rates Year End Federal Reserve 6.00% Average Cost of new house$113,200.00 Average Income per year $31,230.00 Events: include Brady bill signed into law, World Trade Center...
Harvey and Habits……keeping a marriage solid?
Harvey the Grey Cat. This morning. Harvey likes the end of the bed while I am in the shower, shaving and all that. He waits so he can approve of my attire for the day. He’s easy because he always approves.
Looking back Inside our Mind
What’s it like inside our minds? Oh, we all know that our cranial container has all this gray stuff composed of crisscrossing nerves and synaptic tissue.
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